4 Ways To Use Pinterest For Business

Who doesn’t like visual things? We all do.
We live in a visual world, and that’s what makes Pinterest so great for small businesses. It’s a way to share your products and interests through photos to create a vibe, evoke a feeling and make a connection with a potential customer.
Today, I’d like to share four ways that you can use Pinterest to further your reach and grow your business.

But first things first, what is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a virtual pinboard, a vision board or mood board of sorts. It’s a place to save cool things you find on the web, in a magazine, or even in a shop. Users can simply add Pinterest to their browser to capture things they find online or they can snap a quick pic of something they see on the street or in a magazine and upload it to their board.

Best of all, Pinterest is social. You can share pins via twitter or facebook, users can like a pin or repin it. You can also follow people on Pinterest and be notified when they have new pins. Or you can go old school and use the search function to find something specific.
All of this means that there are a lot of eyes to potentially see what folks are pinning on Pinterest.

So, how can you use Pinterest to grow your business?

• Show your style If you run a design company of some sort, Pinterest is a grand slam for you. You can find clients solely based off your boards. Share your winning design boards and ideas. Don’t be shy. Or if you are looking for a designer, search Pinterest to find one that’s your style.

• Market research If you run a retail store you can create a collaboration board where anyone can add to it. Title it “Things you’d like to see” and ask your followers to pin cool things they would like to see in your shop. Or if you design and create goods, use Pinterest to see trends. Check out what people are pinning and use boards for inspiration. Now, that’s a fun way to do market research.

• Word of mouth Pinning your own goods over and over is frowned upon on Pinterest. But offering a really easy way for visitors to your site to share your goods on their boards, is a fantastically smart marketing move. Pinterest makes it really easy to create a “pin it” button for your retail site. They even have a button creator that will automatically fill out a description for the person pinning. This means users can share your marketing message with just a click of a button.

• Community building Because Pinterest supports open, collaboration boards, it’s a great place to share like-minded finds. Create a board for your friends, fans and followers to collaborate. Title it, add a description and moderate it from time to time. Creating and moderating a pin board is a fun way to further your “expert” factor.

Drive traffic home

As with all social media, make sure you have your Pinterest account driving traffic back to your site. Pinterest is so cool that it allows you a place to link up to your website, Facebook and Twitter account in your profile.
So what are you waiting for? Go get that “pin it” button, add it to your site pronto and like any social network, engage and have fun!

How are you going to use Pinterest for business?

by Sarah Burns "The Mogul Mom"blogger