What is Pinterest?

What is Pinterest?

It seems new social media platforms are emerging daily. One that is receiving considerable attention, and credibility from a business standpoint, is Pinterest.
Pinterest is a photo sharing site that has started to gain the momentum of a social media giant. In fact, it is the fastest social media platform to surpass the ten million unique visitor mark. This coupled with its ease of use makes it the place to be if you are trying to gain an audience for your website, products or services.
Businesses have now begun to take a serious look at Pinterest as a marketing tool – many have come to see it as an ideal platform for distributing their messages.
Initially, Pinterest was just a digital scrapbook to ‘pin’ all of the cute and interesting things you found around the web for later reference. As Pinterest became more popular, so did sharing among its “pinners”. Soon their creativity began to reveal the amazing things that were possible within the Pinterest framework. The potential became clear and as new features were incorporated the platform became an even more powerful social media tool.
Today’s Pinterest is a picture sharing platform that allows you to create themed boards to pin pictures, videos, discussion groups and gifts for purchase. Each item pinned can be clicked to open into a larger image, and this page contains a link back to the originating URL, a detailed description that the pinner has set, as well as a comment section which allows visitors to create discussions.
Each pin can also be liked and/or re-pinned to a board on the visitors’ Pinterest profile. So in theory; if someone likes a post you wrote about DIY picture frames, they could pin a picture of it onto their “Crafty” board. Then their followers, or even someone browsing the Pinterest home page, could see it and repin it to their “Centerpieces” board, thus exposing it to all of their followers. And so on and so forth. In a matter of hours your post could have thousands of views, all of which stem from one simple pin.

Recent research on Pinterest has shown the site is helping businesses generate leads through inspiration boards. Pinterest is booming with new users and many subjects that of interest to potential customers. Even though Pinterest is still in its early days, it is a social platform worth investigating for marketing purposes.

(Photo Via: Pinterest)

>> Core Online Marketing assists small and mid-sized businesses develop and execute their social media strategies.

Ben Molfetta