Guys, have you noticed unusual and exceptional smells coming from your kitchen? A new wreath on the door every time you return from checking the mail? A quilt made of all your old jerseys hanging in your man cave? Your baby wearing only a knitted cap sitting in your porch flower pot? Well these are all good signs that your wife has been on Pinterest.
What is Pinterest you ask? Pinterest is, as stated by Pinterest.com, “a virtual pinboard — a place where you can organize and share all the beautiful things on the web.” People use pinboards to find inspiration for decorating their homes, planning their wedding, taking photos, as well as to organize their favorite recipes and discover new ones (the list goes on and on of things to pin).
What makes Pinterest the next big social media outlet? It’s the ability for users to browse and “follow” pinboards created by other users, “with millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.”
How do you get started? Well, right now Pinterest is invite only. You can either request an invite on Pinterest or you can get a friend that is currently a member to invite you. Pinterest can be accessed by adding the “pin it” button to the desktop bookmark bar, “follow me” and “pin it” button added to personal website or blog pages, and Pinterest for iPhone available through the App Store.
Why Should you care? If you are a marketer or business owner you should care, because:
- In October 2011, the site surpassed 421 million pageviews, which means that each of its 3 million users at the time spent a good amount of time browsing Pinterest. That would be an average of 140 pageviews per user
- The site registered more than 11 million unique visitors in January 2012, up from the 3 million in October 2011
- From September to December 2011 estimated Unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429%
- Pinterest has quickly become one of the most popular social media portals for consumers to visit prior to visiting retailers’ websites…. It is driving more traffic than Google+
- It is now in the top 10 websites in traffic in the category of social networking, which adds up to 40 times the number of visits it had six months before.
- Traffic Pinterest sent elsewhere has risen dramatically, making it a top five referrer for several apparel retailers, according to internal data from Monetate.
- Pinterest is generating more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn COMBINED.
As more and more people, marketers and businesses catch wind of Pinterest we are sure to see tons of creative ways to utilize this social media marketing platform as a powerful marketing tool. There are already many ‘Pinterest-ing’ ways to start utilizing Pinterest for your business, but we will have to cover those in another blog.
For more information and to view the stats in this blog, go here:
http://blog.redclayinteractive.com/how-to-utilize-pinterest-for-your-business
http://mashable.com/2012/02/08/pinterest-affiliated-links/#view_as_one_page-gallery_box4223
http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/pinterest-infographic.jpg
