How Pinterest Benefits Your Brand
By now you’ve probably heard of the social media website Pinterest. Sure, Pinterest is great application that allows users to “pin” & organize articles, recipes, DIY project instructions, and photos that interest them for quick access later on, but surely it’s only beneficial for personal use, right? What you might be unaware of is that Pinterest is also a great platform to get your brand or business recognized. In the past three years, this social discovery network has gained millions of active users and that makes it a great tool for marketing your products creatively.
I say “creatively” because even though Pinterest has recently allowed companies to sign up for Business Accounts, you won’t get much of a following by being overly promotional with your products or business. Every day, millions of users visit Pinterest looking for inspiration, fun project ideas, new trends & styles, and tips & advice to make life easier. Forget the way in which you interact with fans on Facebook and Twitter as this style of engagement will not apply here. You must create “share worthy” pins and keep users engaged with a plethora of fresh inspiration and useful advice or tips.
Pinterest engages users by offering a visually appealing setup which keeps readers around longer than other social media sites.
Since Pinterest allows you to create multiple pin boards, you can categorize pins based on different aspects of your business. For example, if your business sells wedding dresses, you can feature separate boards for bouquets, hair styles, decorations, theme ideas, and wedding attire. Including pins like wedding planning tips, venue decor, and articles related to the wedding industry on the pin boards that they correlate with, along with pins to some of the hottest selling wedding dresses from your company will help you market your products without being too overly promotional. The variety creates a large foundation for sharing and brings in women who are looking for wedding inspiration and ideas- this particular company’s ideal consumer.
For products you wish to promote, don’t forget to use the price tag feature. Any time you include a dollar sign in a pin, it adds a price tag ribbon to the image. When you use the 
price tag feature on a pin, the pin will be pulled into the Gifts section, which you can find from the Pinterest home page. By including a link to your website and the price for the pinned photo of your product, you are not only marketing your product through a secondary site other than your own, you are also encouraging users to visit your website in order to browse the rest of your selection.
As with any of the other social networking sites, it’s all about how you interact with users. Respond to comments that users make on your pins and engage with others by re-pinning and commenting on other users’ posts. The goal is to get as many people to re-pin and interact with your content as possible in order to help create backlinks (think SEO!) and generate awareness for your business and brand.
As if you weren’t busy enough with engaging your Facebook Fans, attending to your Twitter account, and updating your blog! Luckily, there are a number of companies (Brandtastic being an excellent choice) who offer social media packages and manage all these time consuming tasks so you can sit back and watch the magic happen. When it comes to your social marketing strategy, don’t forget that Pinterest is a great tool for creating brand awareness and offers a visually pleasing experience that keeps users around for longer amounts of time than Facebook & Twitter. While it may not be better or worse than the other social platforms, it does offer a different way to have users engage with your business.