Social Media for Business Part 3: Pinterest for Business

I am completing a three-part series on social media platforms for businesses with one blog for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Welcome to Part 3!

I will be highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of using Pinterest based on my own experience; I do social media marketing for almost ten different companies, so I'll be sure to take the best of the best advice to pass on to you!

Let's begin with the advantages of using Pinterest for your business:

1) Pinterest is a visual platform: In general, people are lazy! Pinterest makes it easy to visually share things related to your business as well as your product without requiring the user to do all that much work.
2) It's easy-really easy: Pinterest is basically a digital bulletin board and they make it work exactly as such. It's also very easy to browse content and search specifically for content for your pages.
3) Just like other social media platforms, you don't have to just talk about your business: Let's say you own a flooring company. You can make boards for the wood you sell and picture of houses you've done. You can also make boards of neat home remodel ideas, pin about the town your business is based out of, and even a DIY board for home improvements. The possibilities are endless with Pinterest and it's easy to gain interest just by having interesting content.
4) You can use hashtags and key terms to make your content more searchable: Just like Twitter, you can add hashtags to your pin to increase the reach of your pin.
5) It's good for your SEO: Google indexes Pinterest and can help your SEO greatly.

Pinterest is still new, so some of the disadvantages may be fixed soon. But for now, here are the disadvantages:

1) You can't schedule posts ahead of time: Pinterest does not have an internal scheduling system like Facebook. There are some early developed third party applications that let you "pre-pin", but I have yet to have the time to try to use it.
2) It's easy to create a "flood" in the stream of pins: A flood is created when you pin onto the same board many times over; this give the user a "flood" of pins from that board. This will often cause the user to skip over the entire bunch of pins.
3) It's a little difficult to get users to follow your brand: Pinterest is on the newer side as far as social media goes, so some users are still unfamiliar with the platform. Following company pages and brands is even newer. An added challenge is balancing promotional content with content users are interested in.
4) Watch out for copyright infringement and spam: Sometimes users pin things that they are not supposed to. Always click on the pin and see where it goes to make sure it is what the pin says it is!

Pinterest is new but it is growing quickly! Grab your business name as soon as you can and pin away.

Have you began a business Pinterest page? What do you like to pin for your business?

Until next time!
~Melissa