I don't know what half of these icons are, when will we reach a tipping point?
Wow another social media site, when will we reach the tipping point? It seems like a new SM pops up as often as campaign ads. The latest new comer and potential power house is Pinterest. Fear not, it is not as obligatory for business as Facebook appears to be, but if you have a lifestyle business it could be of interest to you. More about that later, but first a quick break down of what Pinterest is.
We don't have kids but our refrigerator still gets "decorated"
Do you remember the old cork-boards in dorm rooms and other public spaces? Or even the family refrigerator “decorated” with notes, shopping lists, kids artwork, magnets from take out restaurants, family trips, and let us not forget those mandatory primary colored plastic Fisher Price letters. Pinterest is like a digital version of of the old family refrigerator (pre stainless when magnets actually stuck).
Pinterest allows you to “pin” things you find online allowing you to easily return to them as well as sharing them with everyone in your network or people that follow you. To help your page from being cluttered you can break your pins down into boards (remember the cork board analogy?) Pinterest provides you with a few pre determined boards to get started, but you can rearrange and name your boards however you like. You will automatically be following a few people when you start, you can look through their boards for ideas and “re pin” anything from their boards. When perusing the internet if you find things of interest, you can “pin” them by copying the “URL” and returning to your Pinterest site, or you can easily add the “pin it” tool to your internet tool bar when you sign up for Pinterest there is an easy tutorial on how to add it.
That's it i'm slipping into a sugar coma that is too sweet!
Some of the cool ways I have seen individuals utilizing Pinterest is planning weddings and home remodels, keeping a digital scrapbook of things they want, need or things that inspire them. I have also seen it used as a registration for wedding or baby shower gifts. It is also ripe with syrupy sweetness, not great desert recipes but mountains of baby animal pictures. If you like that, great, most people have some variation of it on their site, but fear not if you like someones else’s board except their cute baby animal one you can pick and chose which boards you follow instead of following all of their boards-which may include boards of puppies hugging kittens.
Pinterst the new kid on the social media block
Pinterest for business – what’s the draw? Pinterest, unlike Facebook, does not differentiate between personal and “fan” or business - at least not yet – so it is up to you to set it up how you like, as your personal or business page. As I mentioned before it can be a powerful tool for lifestyle business. What does lifestyle business mean? If your business could be represented by a sleek magazine that is rich with photos it could be considered a life style business and could do well on Pinterest. This is a very graphic oriented site, you can only “pin” photos. Without photos interesting or not, there is nothing to “pin”. Fortunately as travel consultants we fit into the lifestyle category. Think of all of the travel magazines on the shelf at your local bookstore.
It is important that you do not over promote on your site (unwritten rule for all SM). We try to balance by providing “brand related” pins on our site, things like recipes that remind us of our favorite trips, vintage travel posters, travel related books, travel gear, etc. Any time someone “pins” either from a board or website it is shared with everyone in their network increasing the reach of the business that was pinned. When people click on the photograph or “pin”, it will direct them to the web site it came from, increasing traffic to that business’ site and as Martha says, “that’s a good thing” for business. We have only just started but we have already seen traffic to our website from our Pinterest site. (What can social media do for your business?)
Pinterest is still in beta testing and is open by invitation only, but is is easy to get an invite taking only a few days. Just go to http://pinterest.com/ and ask for an invite or ask us we will help you. Check out our Pinterest site http://pinterest.com/gwnunnadventure/
Safe travels and happy pinning,
Greg
Examples of business on Pinterest:
http://pinterest.com/time_magazine/
http://pinterest.com/wholefoods/
