Will Pinterest ever become a business tool? No one is saying no at the moment and why would we? With 12.4 million subscribers and a continuing rapid growth it is difficult to write off this latest phenomenon in the social media arena. But seriously, where Facebook always had the potential to reach business people and has the associated diverse functionality to enable business users to think about the possibilities of a social infrastructure for business; and twitter can be seen as an aid to customer service and a means to broadcast instantly to a large customer base, do we really think that simply pinning pictures to a (fairly sophisticated) notice board will improve sales or even increase brand recognition? Having just subscribed to Pinterest and ‘pinned’ my first picture the first thing that struck me was how easy it is to use, clearly this is why it has been so successful to date. You do not have to think hard about what you are going to say, the act of selecting a picture in itself drives the content of any comment you may add. Given all most companies today are spending huge sums of money creating on-line imagery anyway, taking the images and placing them somewhere else is a logical next step.
The big question though, is who should ‘pin’ to Pinterest? And this is where several companies have already got smart. Pinterest is not about ‘companies’ using the application to sell or present their products, it is about your customers or potential customers selling for you. Therefore the images have to be interesting in a way that causes the viewer to want to ‘pin’ it. Try it, go to Pinterest and search on any brand name, your customers have already ‘pinned’ your products. This is interesting, but add to it the ability to pin videos and instantly your ad campaign moves to another media platform – free of charge. The key is to make the video interesting, quirky, funky, if you do, someone will ‘pin’ it.
