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I love Pinterest. I like to look around, find recipes and crafts, daydream about all the cool stuff I’ll be able to make. I once convinced myself I was going to decorate my house and throw a holiday party with all of the recipes and DIY home décor ideas I collected. Of course, it never happened, I would estimate a good 85% of all of my exercises in Pinterest creativity end in complete and utter failure.

Aside from my personal time on Pinterest, I spend a fair amount of time on the platform for one of my clients. I run social media for a local butcher and am always looking for places to post recipes and tutorials. Pinterest has been my go-to site since I took over managing this account, but the last few months I have noticed Yummly pushing significant traffic to our website without much effort on my part.

This got me thinking, as great as Pinterest is, am I missing some good traffic by exclusively working on this site instead of branching out and trying something new? After looking into Yummly and spending more time building out a profile for my client, I saw huge improvements in referral traffic, most of which was coming from Yummly. Pinterest is a great place to spend a little bit of time, but my advice is to seek out sites specific to your industry. Today I want to take a deeper look at a few options in a couple of industries that do a good job of driving traffic and reaching people that ordinarily wouldn’t see content without the help of a social sharing platform.

Yummly

Since I already mentioned Yummly, I guess I should start there. Yummly is an easy to use and easy to navigate recipe sharing site. The profile is simple to set up and saving recipes takes the click of a mouse. This is a great place for businesses to share recipes and get a little more reach out of their content. Because it is food-related content only, recipes aren’t competing with other topics and the audience is specifically looking for food-related content. Restaurants, grocers, even farmers markets could benefit from a Yummly account. Much like Pinterest, Yummly is highly visual. The photo below shows what a typical home screen looks like once an account is set up. Photos really drive the platform, making it easy for people to scan through a lot of recipes at once and click to save the ones that look good.

yummly

Houzz

Switching gears a little bit, for those in the home services industry, Houzz is a great place to reach an interested audience, share content and drive people back to the website. Houzz is a cross between content sharing, online store and advertising platform. What I find most appealing about Houzz is the way content is organized. Categories are broken down and easy to navigate through. I also like Houzz because it shows what a home or specific room could look like with the products featured on the site. It’s much easier to get people excited about products or services when they can see it and image how much better their own home would look with new products or upgrades.

Houzz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ravelry

This site is a little obscure but proves my point that there is a community for everyone. Imagine you’re a business that sells yarn. What better place to get social than on a site centered around all things to do with knitting? Ravelry covers everything from tips and tricks to patterns and expert advice. If you were, in fact, a yarn business, this would be the ideal place to position yourself as an industry expert and drive people back to your site with helpful information.

Blog content, store, showing new designs and patterns are all a part of the community on Ravelry. This website is a niche site and not applicable to a lot of businesses, but it does illustrate the point that every industry or product category has a unique place to share content with a community of people seeking out information about what you’re specifically selling.

ravelry

These are only a few examples of the seemingly endless niche social sharing platforms out there. The goal is to put your idea or product in front of potential customers. Yes, Pinterest is a great place to start and an important platform to have a presence on, but smaller niche sites will do a great job of putting your business in front of the right audience. Whatever your industry is, take some time to find your small, online community of people specifically interested in what you have to say and what you have to sell.

Social Media Starter Kit

Roundpeg is an Indianapolis content marketing firm.