The Power of Pinterest

According to this TechCrunch post, with a YoY growth of 4000% and another report from Shareaholic suggesting that Pinterest generates more referral traffic than any of the other social media sites like Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube - Pinterest is one social platform that needs to be looked at very seriously.

To Those Who Are Still Wondering What Pinterest Is

Pinterest is a social photo sharing platform that came into being in March 2010. From being an invitation only platform to one of the leading photo sharing platform today, it has come a really long way today.

At first, you would wonder that how a simple photo sharing site can become so popular, and especially with women. Yes, women constitute about 68.2% of the users on Pinterest.

The beauty lies in the ease to ‘Pin’ a certain photo that you have liked. In clear term, it’s easy to curate photos of the stuffs you like and that has made Pinterest one of the hottest social media platforms.

What’s in it for a Brand?

While there has been absence of major Indian brands on Pinterest, they already have the biggest brands like Nike, Nordstorm and even the Indian arm of Pepe Jeans doing good.

Again with a high percentile of women and typically in the age group of 25-34, you are well in the know of the audience. Also, according to Mashable, the top 5 listed categories on Pinterest are:

1. Home
2. Arts and Craft
3. Style and Fashion
4. Food
5. Inspiration/Education

So if you’re a brand, with focus on any of the above, this is one platform that you should not miss. And even otherwise, if you are a brand which has products with great visual appeal you must adopt Pinterest.

5 ways how Pinterest is helpful

1.  Traffic

Every pin or a photo on Pinterest is linked to a page on the website, which means every click on the Photo will lead the user to your site. This gives you one more avenue to generate referral traffic to your site.

2.    Promotion

With the ability to link to other social accounts like Facebook, Twitter to Pinterest, brands can easily proliferate their products by posting to just one platform and having it take care about the rest of the process.

3.    Engagement

For every photo that has been uploaded, Pinterest gives an option to comment. This would give brands one more avenue to engage with their consumers and also get their feedback on particular products

4.    Agility

With thousands of visitor logging on PInterest every day, for brands just getting to link a product from its website to Pinboards, can accelerate their reach to the masses.

5.    Competitor Analysis

Yes, you’ll like this one. Pinterest can be great at judging your competitors too. Just having to see their Pinboards and the way they are getting traffic and subscribers can give you great insights to their business strategies. As a brand, it would be good to know the customer psyche and adapt your products to appeal to them.

While the adoption of Pinterest is very far and few in the Indian industry, I would really look forward to see some retail brands leveraging it. Pinterest is a great medium for the visual thinking kind of users, so it’s up to the brands how they can appeal to them.

For starters, brands can just have a ‘Pin it’ button on their pages & let their visitors do the rest.

Featured Image: Kexino