Picture Credit: Pinterest
Pinterest has doubled in size in the last two years, still though a lot of people don’t get it and a lot of businesses don’t get it or how it fits into their social marketing. Maybe it is that Pintrest appeals to certain people, people who are much more likely to be inspired and interested by images than words, that isn’t everyone and stats on the use of Pinterest would suggest that women are more likely to the ones who are being visually stimulated by Pintrest but vitally they are having their initial interest tweaked by images and then going to find out more.
Data from various Facebook campaigns has shown as well that an interesting image, perhaps which poses more questions than it answers, is more likely to get a link clicked on in Facebook than a lot of words of even a lot of words explaining a picture.
In short then on Pintrest people are saying to themselves wow that’s an interesting or beautiful picture I want to find out more and if you’re use of Social Marketing is primarily to drive traffic then this is very powerful.
A lot of those who do use Pintrest are e-commerce stores showing off products, with images being shared on Pintrest and genuinely interested traffic coming through this is very effective for them. What if you offer something else though, a service perhaps or you could simply be a blogger keen to get traffic flowing to your site to increase revenue form ads. Pintrest is about posting interesting and intriguing pictures, often more than product shots that have little mystique other than ‘How much does that cost?’ and ‘Where can I buy that?’. With a blog an image on Pintrerst of something interesting or perhaps even truly amazing can get people to click through to find out more and find out the story behind the image. If your article is only tenuously related you may get a high bounce rate but for photo journalists especially and those with really interesting stories to tell and a picture to start form Pintrest is the obvious place to get visitors from and to gain interest.
Using Pintrest for Social Marketing isn’t limited to getting traffic through to your site directly or even about whether people on Pintrest will repin your images, which can massively increase your visitors if enough people, or the right people do this. Using Pintrest for Social Marketing is a lot like Social Bookmarking where the right image and link can go viral and start being linked to from dozens or hundreds of sites.
Using Social Marketing this way you are able to get huge quantities of direct traffic but long term for your domain as a whole the affect for SEO is even greater and one good image and accompanying article put on to Pintrest could boost your domain’s pagerank by 1 or 2.
This may then seem like an easy way for a business or other website to gain more traffic though, but it isn’t it requires great images and content and unless you are lucky to have the skills yourself or in house already you will need to invest in someone’s services but the returns could still be huge.
