What is Pinterest?
First thing first – what is Pinterest and why should I care? Pinterest, in a nutshell, is an online pinboard allowing you to “pin” interesting stuffs from the web and share them with fellow pinners, your blog readers – everyone.
You can pin almost everything – web pages, videos, images, etc. Your pins can be organised into pinboards of any topics you want. You can also comment/like on other pins, repins interesting stuffs found on Pinterest, and share your pins.
Because Pinterest is visual-driven, it’s obvious that images are probably the most popular digital stuffs pinned by pinners. This is why the title of this blog post comes around – read on.
What Pinterest can do for your business blog
Well, I can’t just endorse Pinterest (yet) as I just joined a couple of days ago. However, I have some explorations done on Pinterest, as well as on the web, looking for what people think about Pinterest. What I found is quite amazing, and I’m sure this interests you, too.
First off, pinners pin something because it’s interesting. An article can also be definitely pinned, but you see, article images are the icing of the cake. When someone pins your blog post, what he/she will need to do is to choose an image suitable to be pinned, along with a description about the image/post. It’s obvious that Pinterest focuses on images, makes it a great place to promote art stuffs, such as those from Etsy.
Promote? Yeah – just like in any social media sites, you can – in subtlety – do a promotion, as long as you are not abusing the system and annoying other pinners. Again, not only photos or art stuffs, you can share your article. And guess what – if you are interested in SEO (business bloggers should have an interest in SEO!) what you pin will give you a link back – with no nofollow attribute attached! So, if your pin pages happen to be indexed by Google, you can definitely get nice link juice coming from Pinterest.
That being said, Pinterest is definitely yet another great channel for your business branding. Some big companies have done it, sharing the photos of their products and get pinners repins, like and share them to their network – indeed, a study reveals that Pinterest engages and retains 2-3 times better than Twitter does; a business branding heaven? May very well be.
Now, I’m sure that you are interested how Pinterest can help your business blog to get more traffic – let me share you this: Problogger’s Darren Rowse – in one of his blog posts – claimed that he got 1,000 visits a day from Pinterest – and has later improved it to 3,000 visits a day. The traffic comes from pinners who pin his blog posts, and Pinterest visitors who have interest in Darren’s blog posts. With Pinterest’s growing traffic (Pinterest is Alexa’s Top 100 sites, traffic-wise,) expect more people will jump into the Pinterest bandwagon. Very interesting, indeed.
Takeaway
So, to conclude, you have one more (strong) reason to add interesting images to your business blog posts. Blog post images help you make your point in your blog posts, thus keeping readers engaged.
Now, answering one more question – “should I optimize for Pinterest? Isn’t that too much?” Indeed, optimizing your site for one particular social media site is not really a good move. However, tweaking your business blog in such a way that you can accommodate a larger audience is a plausible business blog building strategy.
So, business bloggers – add images to your posts and optimize your business blog for Pinterest, as – indeed – it has all the potential to be the next big thing.
Are you using Pinterest for business purpose? If so, please share what you think of Pinterest by leaving your comment below…
Ivan Widjaya
Pinterest rocks!