ShareWelcome to this week’s post on Simple, Smart & Sexy.
By now, you have probably heard about Pinterest, the fastest growing social network in the United States, and to me a Simple, Smart & Sexy network for consumers and marketers.
Take a look at this week’s video to learn what is it about and how to make the most out of it.
Pinterest is an image-sharing platform, which allows users to “pin” (bookmark) sites, interests, images or videos in boards they create. Despite the fact that technically it’s still an invitation-only site in February it became the number 3 social network in the US, outgrowing Linkedin and Google+, which somehow indicates that users like to share and comment upon other people’s discoveries on the web.
It is really Simple, because it is the very easy to manage. Users “pin” images that can be commented and “repinned” by other users on their own boards; kind of like Twitter, but far more visual.
It is also Smart, because boards are a very smart tool to organize your interests. You can browse images posted in popular topic areas, such as “funny” or “my style”, which makes it a Smart tool to discover new content.
It’s also Sexy because it’s based on visuals, both pictures and video, and if you’ve been following me you know that 80% of our decisions are based on what we “see”.
Why is Pinterest interesting for brands and what can you do with Pinterest?
• Visibility and SEO. Every photo that is pinned will include a link back to the website that originated it. The more interesting the pictures the more re-pins they will get, so get ready to publish awesome visuals on your website, as this will guarantee you will get more pins (like “likes” on Facebook), which helps increase traffic to your web and improve SEO.
• Great for service brands: we all know it is more complex to sell services than products, as services are intangible. Pinterest allows service providers to make the intangible, tangible through photos. For example, we created boards where we pin Simple concepts, Smart concepts and Sexy concepts. In this respect, Pinterest is helping us bring the Simple, Smart & Sexy concept to visuals which people will understand and interpret much better than words.
• It helps consumers exhibit their personality and status. As always, everything is about status. However, how we understand status could be different from time to time and person to person. Nowadays, it seems that “knowing” is a Status symbol in many instances more important than “possessing”. Pinterest, helps consumers portray what they know, what cool things they are up to and what new stuff they’ve discovered, by quickly pinning it on their boards and letting their followers see how cool they are.
Maybe, not for everybody?
We have clients asking if Pinterest is for them or not. As I don’t think Facebook is good for every brand, Pinterest might not be for everyone either. However, it’s a network, which virtually came out of nowhere, and now it has President Obama “pinning” family recipes on Pinterest. So, my advice to you: get an invitation to Pinterest and claim your brand’s name.
And of course… follow us on Pinterest and share with us your Simple, Smart & Sexy discoveries.
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