What’s Up with Pinterest?
Lorraine recently attended She Podcasts Live – a podcasting conference for women. Lorraine listened to Kim Sutton speak about Pinterest and how it’s the biggest source of traffic for her website. What?! Pinterest? Really? Well, we took a look and realized Kim might be on to something. Our account had over 9,500 views in September even though we haven’t pinned anything in 5 years!
Knowing that Pinterest has the potential to yield great results, it’s time for us to add this social media platform back into our strategy.
A Brief History
Pinterest went live back in January 2010 as a “visual discovery tool” for people with invites-only. The site officially launched in 2011 and within just a few months, over 10,000 users were enjoying Pinterest’s features. Later in 2011, Pinterest made it to Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites” list! At the beginning of 2012, Pinterest had officially left its mark on the social media community with more than 11.5 million users.
The site doesn’t have a terribly long history, but it’s grown beyond expectations since its official launch in 2011. Now in 2019, 250 million people use Pinterest each month.
Pinterest for Business Use
So clearly Pinterest has its fair share of monthly users, but how would a business such as ours even go about using the site to our advantage?
People use Pinterest differently than they use other social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. People visit this platform to search for inspiration, no matter what that may be. It serves a distinct niche in the market.
When setting up your account, you’ll be tasked with making boards that let you organize all of your pins into one place. You might have a board for blogging and another for marketing tips. When creating a board, you want to use keywords in your title just like when you write a blog! SEO is everything.
When actually pinning something, you have two opportunities with each pin to add a link to your website: one in the description and one in the source for the pin. This is what creates traffic to your website.
Another great thing about this platform is that pins are basically immortal. Most social media is disposable meaning when you tweet something, that tweet’s lifespan is just a few minutes. Each time something is pinned, it is reintroduced into the timeline the cycle begins all over again.
Moving Forward
After taking a short, five-year hiatus, we think it’s time that Roundpeg returns to Pinterest. If your business has also abandoned the platform, take a look at it and see what kind of traffic your account was producing. We were amazed that our account was still being viewed so often, but due to the lifespan of a pin, it makes sense. If you’re interested in learning more about Pinterest and what it can do for you, be sure to check out this episode of More Than a Few Words.