10 Things You Need to Know About Pinterest

Maybe you’ve heard of it. Chances are, your sister, wife, friend, mom, daughter, cousin or coworker has signed up and is raving about ‘this thing I saw on Pinterest’. In fact, nearly 70 percent of Pinterest users are female. 50 percent of Pinterest users have kids. It’s hot and continues to grow.

What You Need to Know About Pinterest

  1. Pinterest is an online ‘pinboard’ where users ‘pin’ things they like. Popular categories include travel, home decorating, gardening, food, drinks, do-it-yourself, crafts, style and gifts. From hairstyles to nail art to outfits to backyard gardening, you will find it on Pinterest.

  2. Big Brands who use Pinterest well include Whole Foods, Mashable, Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewert Living and Real Simple.

  3. You can pin original content. All it takes is an image and you can ‘pin’ it to Pinterest. For increasing visitors to your website, simply post the image on a page on your website and then ‘pin’ it to Pinterest. Now, when users click on the pin, they will be taken to the page on your website

  4. You can ‘re-pin’ someone else’s content. In fact, 80% of pins are re-pins of existing content. You can and should change the description of the pin you are re-pinning. You should always ensure that what you are re-pinning links to the original source.

  5. Descriptions of pins can be up to 500 characters. You can use descriptions of your buy ativan online original pins or your repins to capture your audience and drive them to your website

  6. Pinterest allows search engines to crawl their website.

  7. When creating your Pinterest boards use your top keywords as Pinterest Board Titles show up in URLs.

  8. Pinterest grew from 40,000 users to 3.2 million users in one year from Oct. 2010 to Oct. 2011. This is faster than Facebook and Twitter’s rate of growth in their formative years.

  9. Pinterest users spend an average of about one hour on the website.

  10. People love Pinterest because it is visual, there is less pressure to socialize, you can choose the boards you follow (so if one of your friends posts things that don’t interest you, you can choose to only follow their boards that do)

So, should you be jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon? Here are 3 questions from Horizon Media to help you decide.

  1. Is your audience there?

  2. Is the conversation that’s happening one you want to participate in?

  3. Are you equipped to participate, when it comes to content, resources and people, to keep the presence active?

If you have a product or service that can be made visual, you target women (especially in the 25 to 45 year old range), you target moms, and you have the time to remain active with your Pinterest account then, yes, you should be signing up for Pinterest, pronto!