Should Your Company Be on Pinterest?

My wife and I have recently been working on some home improvements in our house. As you could imagine, we are often online looking at ideas and “Do-It-Yourself” tutorials. Last night I was researching how to rewire a room for wall sconces while my wife was reading about different types of curtains.

A majority of our online time has been spent surfing on Pinterest.com doing research and looking for ideas. Pinterest offers a “visual search” that allows users to quickly scour through products and ideas while letting them know what others are recommending. After getting sucked in and bouncing from pinned idea to pinned idea for a few hours, it occurred to me that this is a new take on a very old idea, “word-of-mouth marketing”.

Research has long shown that Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to get people to take action and buy. So if we find a product or idea on Pinterest that has been “pinned” by our peer users then it stands to reason that it is a good solution for us as well. As a result of using Pintrest, my wife and I visited many helpful websites that we have since bought new products from.

Google vs. Pinterest for Your Company
You might be asking yourself, “Should my organization be on Pintrest?” I believe that if your organization sells a product that you should strongly consider creating a presence on Pintrest. Creating the account and ‘pinning’ a few of your products only takes a few moments and has no cost. Also, your website might generate better profits from Pinterest.com than on Google. For example, when I wanted to learn some specifics about how to rewire a room to install wall sconces I did seven or eight different search terms trying to attempt to get to a website that would help me. But unfortunately, I couldn’t find a website that was able to help me. So after some frustrations with Google I went over to Pinterest.com and did a search and up came exactly what I needed. I saw several photos linking me to websites that provided me with tutorials, videos and products to buy. I ended up bookmarking this website because it offers valuable content. They didn’t win the keyword game on Google but they definitely won the hearts of many people who pinned and repinned their products, ideas and photos which ultimately got me to buy from them.

I think that you’ll find the ‘pinning’ and ‘repinning’ mechanics of the site will provide a very fruitful, yet inexpensive way of advertising your goods or services.

Most importantly, if you haven’t checked out Pinterest yet, you really should do so immediately. It’s a very exciting and new way of expressing ourselves in our ever-changing technical world. Organizations that quickly adopt, understand, and strategically utilize tools like Pintrest will definitely have an early leg up on their competition. You owe it to yourself to check it out!