Getting Your Agency Onboard with Pinterest

It seems that overnight, Pinterest has fast become a social media platform not to be ignored. According to comScore, Pinterest has already made history by reaching the 10 million member mark faster than any previous platform. Not only has the growth been impressive, but the average time on site has already surpassed Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. That’s not the only place Pinterest is beating out the competition either. It has also shown impressive referral traffic rates, driving more traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ combined! Besides some impressive initial stats with growing buzz, why should you care about this platform for your agency?

Humanizing Your Company: Social media has opened the doors of humanizing your brand and company. No longer are companies confined by websites and business conversations to show their personalities. Pinterest is a great outlet for showing personality because of its visual nature. What makes it different? Companies can create customized boards by whatever name or category they would like. Does your company have great cubicle spaces? Fashion-forward employees? Great holiday parties? Or, how about great taste in food for lunch hour? Pinterest is all about showing your personality and highlighting attributes that are interesting about your company that others can repin. Getting your employees involved is another way to help put the faces of your company into the social media space. Pinterest has a cool option of “adding contributors” to boards as well if you would like to have multiple users able to contribute.

Showcase Work: High referral rates are a key reason to want to share your work and increase client exposure. Your client who was just featured on great ideas for spring parties or and that fun new mobile game for kids are great material to pin. Whether it is a product or service, chances are someone on Pinterest will find the piece interesting. Make sure that you set up click-through links and properly categorize and tag your posts for maximum exposure. While thinking about material to pin, do be mindful of keeping your information and posts informative, so that you don’t come across as spam.

Another option on Pinterest is to create boards based on client categories. Do you represent a lot of restaurants, designers or products? Whatever kind of clients you have, you can create a relative board to feature some of their key pieces or top-selling products.

New Business and Networking Opportunities: For companies, a quality that makes Pinterest the perfect platform to interact with peers and consumers is the freedom to pin whatever you want. You’ll find DIY projects, great recipes, products, etc., but what you’ll also start collecting are all of the great websites that those recipes came from, and that online retailer that sells that cool product you didn’t know about pre-Pinterest. While you are sifting through posts on the website looking for great things to repin or like, you might come across a great product that aligns with your industry. After checking out their website, you might find that your company could be a good fit for doing business with them in the future.

Discussion Questions

• After reading about the options and benefits of Pinterest, how do you think your agency can use Pinterest?
• What kind of boards do you think would be a good fit?
• Can you think of any other ways Pinterest could be useful for your company?