What is Pinterest?
It’s a kind of online pin board, a visual take on the social bookmarking site. The content which is shared on Pinterest is driven completely by visuals. The user cannot share anything unless an image is involved. It is actually a big database with a lot of beautiful pictures with a direct link to the website where it comes from. People can upload pictures about almost everything (e.g. travelling, food, decorating, etcetera). It is the women who are using this network the most (70% women and 30% men, in the Netherlands at the moment). Nowadays, this channel has around 100 million active users. For businesses it is quite interesting to be active on Pinterest, partly because the website time is around 15 minutes.

 

How does it works?
It starts with creating an account and making “boards” (Boards are where you save your Pins). There are three different ways to put pictures on a board.
1. Find a picture on a website and push the pin it button and just choose the board you want.
2. Pin the picture from Pinterest, this is called “re-pinning”. A lot of people are doing this, 80% of the pins are “re-pint”. Content can spread really fast on this network, much faster than on Twitter for example.
3. The last way is to upload a picture from your own computer, but this happens not that often, because there is not a link to a website in this case.
It’s possible to follow people, but people can also just only follow some boards from others.

 

New functions
Some new functions are developed in the last few years, like “visual search” and the “buy-it button”. With the visual search can a customer select a part of a picture and use this part to search for things which are looking similar. Until now it’s only possible to use the buy-it button in the USA. With this button it is possible to buy some products that are visible on the pins.

 

Pinterest versus other social media
Everything goes about inspiration, visual and interests with this channel. Furthermore, is Pinterest also used as a search engine. It’s about collecting pictures and keeping them for yourself. Other social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are about uploading things or things you’re doing for others. So, Pinterest is about plans for the future and dreams.
But, what those channels have in common, is that they are all used on mobile devices the most.

 

Pinterest in business  
Pinterest can have different functions for your business:
1. It creates more traffic to your website, but it can also create sales.
2. Brand recognition.
3. It can built a community.
4. Research about the customers can be done with Pinterest. What do they pin about and what can be learned from the target group.
5. Online visibility and finability.  

 

The travel industry and Pinterest
In the Netherlands are not that much tourism organisations using Pinterest active, so when you as a company will use this channel you’re an early adaptor. “Travel” is one of the topics which is really popular to search for within Pinterest. The “Place boards” and “Place pins” are useful to use as tourism organisation. Some examples of tourism organisations that are having an account are: Jetsetter, KLM, and Thomas Cook. But one thing that KLM did should you never do on Pinterest, they pint pictures on Pinterest and used the link of their own website, although those pictures were not on their website. This is a kind of spam and is irritating for most of the Pinterest users. It’s also not good to pin to commercial directly, it is better to be creative.

 

I’m not using Pinterest, but this lecture made me quite interested in this social media channel. So I think I will also sign up, make an account and see if it’s something for me. I can imagine that using Pinterest in an active way can help your business to get more customers.