Does My Business Need to Be on Pinterest?

Pinterest is the visually stimulating social media service that can sit neatly alongside a company’s Facebook or Twitter account. But will your business really see any reward from the process of uploading images or video, and what are the costs and benefits for your company?

Pinterest for Business aims to engage users and customers, helping everyone from cruise lines to boutique furniture makers show off their wares at their best to an audience that is increasingly receptive to a visual medium.

A good collection of images encourages people to buy products and will help them remember the company more, compared to one using text-heavy social posts and websites. Pinterest makes the uploading and tagging of images simple and provides a better way to present boards, groups or archives of images than other social media.

Therefore, any business with something visually appealing to sell will find that Pinterest is a natural fit. A 2017 survey showed that people are more engaged and use the site as a visual search or research tool. This helps grow awareness of your business and products, can drive blog traffic to traditional text posts, and help generate leads and sales.

Pinterest may have started out with a reputation as a place to share pictures of food, but it has moved on massively since those early days. The most popular categories of 2017 include art, flowers and gifts, home and garden, health and beauty, clothing and entertainment.

Show Off Your Good Side on Pinterest

For a company that perhaps doesn’t see itself as trading on visual appeal, there are still plenty of reasons to use Pinterest. The world’s 79th biggest website (according to Alexa), it is hugely important in the U.S., and has growing fans in many countries. As such, any projects, from construction work to manufacture, even developing software can be shown off from concept, to build and delivery. Visually catalogued, processes and decisions can be discussed using Pinterest and used to help the business show off what it does.

While the photos might not be high art in themselves, they can help drive traffic to your main website, forums and store. The cost is largely one of time in taking and posting photos or video and adding a little context. Adding little time to your business day, it also acts as a way to catalogue thought processes or can help act as a library or template for future projects.

If your business has no full or part-time social media staff, you might find someone on the team interested in running the task. With the rich rewards that other Pinterest groups have seen, the results through SEO and user engagement are easy to measure. That makes it quick to judge if the effort was worth it and sticking with.

For brands with lots of imagery, Pinterest is the ideal repository for them, creating different boards to pin photos to, creating plenty of engagement and sharing of images, and linking them back to other social media.

If that’s the case, the problem can be knowing when to stop, and when to focus on your businesses real work. Pinterest can be addictive and should not interfere with the running of the business!

The Invisible Benefits of Pinterest

For a smaller business, Pinterest may seem something of an enigma, but as one of the fastest growing social media services, there are lots of reasons to join. For a start, images remain high profile, while a tweet or Facebook post will soon vanish down the drain of discoverability.

User engagement is very high, and people find Pinterest images through search, Facebook or Twitter, and are happy to share, creating strong and long lasting references. While Pinterest used to be female dominated, there is now a good balance of sex and user age, more reflecting its practical use and wider enjoyment.

Finally, the arrival of video allows business to better show off certain types of products, shows, tutorials or other trade-type events and highlight them in a creative way, outside of Google’s increasingly draconian control of YouTube. Expect Pinterest to grow its focus on video as it becomes increasingly popular.

Pin or Tap Out?

For any busy company, the question of taking on another social media site can be quite a major question. If your business has the time to take photos and do a little sharing, then there’s no real reason not to give it a go. However, if you struggle to provide any exciting visual material, and simply don’t have the time, then it is perhaps not something you would want to invest in right now.

Certainly, there is no harm in trying to see what the results are, and if there’s a shutterbug among your staff, perhaps assigning them the task could provide a material benefit to the business. As with all social media, the only rules are: make whatever you put up interesting and engaging. Do that and you will certainly find an audience.

Tips for Better Pinterest Shots

Whatever you are taking a photo of, take a few seconds to make sure each image is of the highest quality you can, even if capturing it with a smartphone. Try a few phones in the office to see which model takes the best shots!

Ensure the subject is in focus, and get rid of any clutter around the main object. Avoid using flash where possible, natural light is always better.

Zoom in if needed to bring out detail and don’t be afraid to use the phone’s filters or setting adjustments to make the photo look better, or more stylish.

If the subjects are easily portable, then invest in some background card or sheets to make all of your company’s product images look standard.

For people, team or staff photos, try to make them look natural and not forced. People doing things are usually more photogenic than those just staring at the camera.

Add a company logo or watermark to make images harder for others to borrow, and make shared images easier to track back to your company.