Pinning the Business World

                Pinterest is a common social media platform in today’s world. As far as my personal use, inspiration for DIY crafts, recipes, fashion and decorating begin with pinning interesting pins. People also find the social media site beneficial in terms of planning trips, or gaining insight on exciting places to travel to while on a budget. Pinterest is an extremely stimulating social media platform that allows you to organize your thoughts, dreams, goals, and plans all within one place.

I have found that Pinterest is an overwhelming social media site based on my usage of the site. Thousands of pins clutter your feed and can take hours to scroll through if you leave the site for a few days. Luckily, Pinterest’s search que is extremely helpful and customizable to help sort your searches if you are looking for something in particular, or even if you are trying to look at a broad category. Pinterest also can connect with a wide variety of other social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google to help you connect with other fellow pinners to further stimulate your imagination.

In regards to business on Pinterest, I was initially skeptical prior to doing research and fiddling around on the site. Initially, I only saw business interaction as advertisements cluttering my feed, or actual pins with clothing or websites that were linked to a picture or in the caption of a pin. A majority of the links were broken when I found something appealing in a pin. However, my research showed me that businesses have more potential in terms of marketing within Pinterest than I originally thought. The website https://oakcreektrail.com/news/pinterest-tips-market-business/ helped shed light on strategies to employ within Pinterest.

The website discusses how to make a business account “credible” since Pinterest does not currently offer verified accounts as what Twitter does with the little blue checkmark beside the username. Using professional pictures and a detailed description for the biography in the account settings, along with posting the actual company website proved to be good tactics when creating a business Pinterest account. Another major tip for a business looking to use Pinterest to leverage their market share is to not excessively promote the company itself. The general rule of thumb is to re-pin materials in addition to pinning the company’s own products. This way you are able to engage with followers as well as promote your own products or services.

The most interesting “Pinterest Marketing Tactic” that I came across was creating a Pinterest Challenge, where you encourage Pinterest users to create interesting pinboards of content relating to or more specifically, from the company webpage Winners of the most creative pinboard will receive an award, and the business will also generate new pins that are reaching new followers and stimulating interest of the company in other pinners. I found this a very creative way to implement customer interaction with the business within Pinterest.

Customer interaction and company visibility to customers is crucial to be successfully marketing on Pinterest. Initially, I didn’t think that many companies used Pinterest, or if they did, smaller businesses used the platform. After researching, I believe that Pinterest is incredibly beneficial in marketing, especially with challenges such as the one stated above. However, Pinterest does have several drawbacks as a business marketing tool. In my perspective, more females are on Pinterest than men, which limits the target market drastically. Also, customer interaction is severely limited with the fact that interaction is nothing like what businesses can engage in on other platforms, like Twitter. Most people also don’t seek out businesses on Twitter, but rather rely on their newsfeed and pins that other people pin, which could be a limiting aspect for businesses on Twitter. Overall though, I was impressed to realize how many businesses do use Pinterest and the various strategies that are able to be used within the site.