Not considering Pinterest?

I love Pinterest. Apart from getting lost for hours clicking from board to board and re-pinning pins, it’s a very useful place for finding stuff I need (and stuff I really want).

So I’m always surprised when I’m talking to businesses about their Social Media channels and they dismiss Pinterest straight away. Digging deeper there are usually a handful of reasons for this. I have listed the most common below and tried to answer with some (hopefully)convincing arguments. See anything familiar here?

Reason #1 “It’s just for wedding dresses, recipes, cushions and the like…”

Of course, Pinterest is a brilliant resource for people looking for all of these things. But the range of products, topics and brands on there is huge. Just have a search about and you’ll see. From luxury camping to front doors. And from tech gadgets to re-purposed vinyl and millions of other things besides.

It’s hard to think of a subject you can’t search for on Pinterest. And pins are re-pinned, shared and commented on, boards are added to. The list of products on Pinterest just grows and grows — as does the people looking at them.

Reason #2 “My target customers aren’t looking there…”

Are you sure about that? There are more than 100 million active users logging onto Pinterest. So it’s not as big as Facebook or Twitter, but that is a lot of people and it’s growing at a fast rate. In 2015, international growth on Pinterest was 135% and it just keeps on getting bigger.

If you’re marketing to women in particular, you’ll be interested to know that up to 80% of Pinterest users are Female. If you’re marketing to men, be aware that their presence there is growing -over a third of new sign-ups are male.

If you’re still unsure, just have a think about your customer’s interests or your main competitor’s offering and then search on Pinterest — you’ll most likely find a lot of boards to match.

Reason #3 “Pinterest users just browse for inspiration and copy ideas…”

While this might be true for some, did you know that Did you know that 88% of all Pinterest users purchased a product they pinned and a further 49% have purchased 5 or more products they pinned?

Sprout Social report that 93 % of Pinners shopped online in the past six months. And Shopify’s study showed that website traffic referred via Pinterest is 10 percent more likely to make purchase than from other social networks, and they tend to spend twice as much as those referred by Facebook.

Social Media Examiner’s article on Pinterest growth states that Pinterest is second only to Facebook in the amount of traffic it drives to websites.

The fact is that a lot of people are on Pinterest searching for products and services and clicking through to buy — should you be taking advantage of this?

Reason # 4 “I don’t think I have any pin-able content”

Setting up a Pinterest account for your business is much easier than you might assume. Think about your products, brand values and customer interests and create boards around these. You can be as creative as you like. Then you just need to start pinning relevant content from around the web to fill your boards and start attracting visitors.

Of course, you should be pinning your own content too. Useful pages from your website, blog posts, images, videos and product descriptions all count as great Pin-able content. There are loads of tips on marketing on Pinterest. Have a look at this great and concise article from amyporterfield.com.

Although Pinterest isn’t going to be the right Social Media platform for every business or brand, it’s definitely worth investigating. And hopefully the stats and information in this post inspire you to at least consider it within the mix.