Pinterest can be a good content marketing tool for your business. Although I write content for my clients I often advise them to not to stick to just one form of content and explore all the arenas available. If you haven’t used Pinterest much it’s a social media platform that allows people to post images, importantly, from the webpages or blog posts they are currently visiting. Suppose you are on this page (on my blog) and there is an image on this page. If you hover your cursor over the image you will see a Pinterest icon. This allows you to pin this image to your Pinterest dashboard. Most of the dashboards are concentrated collection of images and they are highly focused. What’s the big deal?
When you pin the image to your dashboard the image is automatically hyperlinked to my blog post. If someone clicks the image on your dashboard, that person will be brought to this blog post. This is how traffic is generated from Pinterest. This is why it is very important to have at least one image on your webpage or blog post that someone would like to pin.
Everybody on the Internet likes to share interesting stuff. Sharing videos using YouTube is a complicated process and contrary to that, sharing images with people using Pinterest is quite easy. It just takes a couple of seconds. You can either upload images existing on your computer or you can simply share them from the website where they have been originally published.
This slightly old blog post claims that by 2012 some websites were getting more traffic from Pinterest than Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. By that year it had also become the second highest referrer of traffic just after Facebook.
What sort of websites can benefit from Pinterest content marketing?
On the surface, mostly websites that draw an audience interested in visual content and that too, mostly images and photographs. The first such websites that come to my mind are, fashion websites, entertainment, travel, interior decorators, accessories, cooking and food related items, beauty products, hobbies and crafts, education and such – websites that can convey ideas and messages visually. But then these days any industry can use graphics and images to drive in a point, for example infographics.
In order to use Pinterest, as I just mentioned above, use interesting images and visuals along with written content. Focus on images people would like to share. Just make sure that people can easily pin your images on the dashboards without much effort.