Social Media Insight: Pinterest

For my final look into the world of social media. I'm going to turn my attention to the pinning sensation that is Pinterest...

Pinterest is an online pinboard, a visual take on the social bookmarking site. Unlike other social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon, content shared on Pinterest is driven entirely by visuals. In fact, you can’t share something on Pinterest unless an image is involved. Like every other social media site, Pinterest has its own lingo: When you share something on Pinterest, each bookmark is called a pin. When you share someone else’s pin on Pinterest, it’s called a repin. You group pins together by topic onto various boards or pinboards in your profile. Each board mimics a real-life pinboard.

The first time you visit Pinterest, you may notice immediately that it’s an aesthetically pleasing site. You can see how much it relies on stunning photos.

Pinterest did change a lot of visual looks of most websites after it's launch in 2010. Just take a look at how ebay looks now...

Personally, Pinterest is one of my favourite sites. Svea really got me hooked on this and haven't really stopped pinning since. 

Pinterest does have a lot of influence over the new web and create a visual portfolio for yourself can be a great site, if you have great content to share or stories then this is the perfect site to use.

Pin your own content//

Believe me when I say that you can get lost, just repinning other peoples content, so be vigilant. This is one of the most crucial elements of using Pinterest for content marketing. Of course once you produce content you’re going to share it with as many outlets as possible, and with Pinterest you can use keywords to help optimize your pins. This is important because the Pinterest community is driven by repins rather than unique pins—nearly 80% of all pins are repins, compared to Twitter in which retweets constitute less than 2 percent of all tweets. In short, your pins are much more likely to be shared on Pinterest than any other social site, so you need to be pinning on a regular basis. 

You should also create boards for you content in order to drive traffic to your site. This doesn’t mean that the boards should be entirely made up of your own content—you can seed popular boards for pins that are likely to get you followers and repins, and then put your own content in among them, increasing the likelihood of your pins being (and thus, your website) being seen, liked, or followed.

Infographics//

Infographics are really popular on Pinterest—especially in the business and marketing world—because you can get a lot of information in one image. Recently in the main Pinterest feed on the desktop version, they have started to cut off the image at about 1935 pixels. A grey box now shows up within the feed for you to expand the pin. There is no file size limitation on Pinterest.

Pinnable images//
Entrepreneurs and business owners often feel that they are too busy, don’t have the budget or don’t have the talent to produce a blog with pinnable images. With free easy to use resources, creating images is easier than ever. When it comes to producing high quality images, large brands with huge marketing budgets that can afford professional photographers do have an advantage but that doesn’t mean the small fish in the pond can’t get in on the Pinterest action. To get high quality images it’s no longer necessary to be a professional photographer with expensive equipment. The digital cameras built into mobile phones are amazing and can take some very pinnable images even if you’re not a pro.

So what are you waiting for, get pinning! This is my final look at social media sites that you should be using as well as the big ones of social media. I'll be back to the world of the web next week, so look out for that out.

'Til the next time
James xo