What is Pinterest and how does it work?

With over 200 million active pinners worldwide, Pinterest is certainly a platform that could help your business to reach a new and large audience.

If you are interested in utilising this platform, but are uncertain on what Pinterest actually is or how to use it when it comes to business, then this blog is perfect for you.

 

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a pinboard-style sharing site that allows users to create collections of images and manage these collections, or ‘boards’. Typically these boards will be theme-based, and the images that can be pinned to the boards include images such as events, interests, hobbies, and more.

Unfortunately there seems to be many misconceptions surrounding this platform, including:

  • Pinterest is only used by women
  • Pinterest is only for food and wedding content
  • “My audience won’t be on Pinterest”

Yes the majority of Pinterest users are women but there is still a large number of users that are male.

Pinterest is a place for great visuals and on this platform you can fine a wide variety of interesting and useful posts ranging from wedding themed and home decor content, through to travel and clothing – these just a few of the popular themes of content we see on this platform.

Finally, the Pinterest audience is made up of a wide range of people and through utilising this platform, you may find that your target audience is most certainly using Pinterest, or you may even find a new audience to target.

 

Why use it for business?

There are a number of reasons why Pinterest makes a great marketing tool for business.

Reach a much wider and larger audience

With over 200 million active pinners, this platform certainly has a massive audience and through using this platform correctly, your business can reach this audience.

Helps you achieve visual appeal and engage users

Pinterest can be referred to as a visual discovery tool, so high quality and great visuals is a must when using this platform and what consumer doesn’t like to see stunning and high quality images of a product or venue?

By uploading quality and valuable images to this platform, you are appealing to the audience that uses this platform and engaging them with your content, which in turn can lead into them looking into your brand, or even making a purchase from you.

Converts browsers into buyers

Here are two key statistics we think truly speak for themselves:

  1. 90% of weekly active pinners say Pinterest helps them decide what to purchase
  2. 70% of Pinterest users use the site to find new products

These two stats help to demonstrate just how effective this platform is at achieving sales, when used correctly.

Increase traffic to your website

Did you know that Pinterest is one of the largest website traffic drivers in the world?

Pinterest could be considered a large visual search engine and when users are on this platform and discover an image or board that they like, they are likely to click through to your website to find out more and even make a purchase. This is because every pin (image) you upload to this platform can have a link embedded with it, which makes it easy to lead users back to the source of the image.

The result = more traffic being driven to your website.

Helps to improve your SEO on search engines

Pinterest is one social platform that is regularly indexed through search engines, which means that using this platform and uploading your images can help you to improve your SEO and appear in the searches carried out on these search engines