Promoted Pins : How ‘Pinteresting!’

With the growing power of social media, more and more of the marketing budget is going towards it. While spending big bucks may be useful to some extent, a good strategy is the first step. It’s essential to keep track of the big players in the social media arena and leverage them to your advantage. While Facebook, Twitter, etc. serve their own purpose and cater to different needs in the market, Pinterest should certainly not be overlooked. It is an extremely popular, visual content sharing website. It works in a quirky way, where each user can create virtual boards on any theme under the sun, be it cupcakes or gardening, and ‘pin’ pictures from different websites on to the board. It’s actually just like the board you’d keep in your room when you were in high school and pin all your favorite things to, I certainly did!

Pins – Point of Difference

How Pinterest differs from other social media sites, is that here it’s more about the product category than the brand. For example, people will create boards on and search for themes such as coffee, dresses, etc. and not on the brands selling these products like Starbucks or Forever 21. In other words, it’s more product centric than brand centric. This is a great way for brands to get creative and engage with users – create boards on popular themes that people are interested in, instead of selling your product like you’re doing on every other channel!

Promoted Pins

At the beginning of this month, Pinterest made a very juicy announcement, something businesses can really sink their teeth into. It has rolled out Promoted Pins, which will now allow businesses to advertise themselves but in a more discreet and less flashy way than traditional internet advertisements. The businesses will be able to insert their own pins into search results and category feeds, but in a more natural and less forced way. These pins will not be the typical, in-your-face ads, there, whether you want to see them or not. The visual nature of Pinterest and the fact that they’ll appear to interested users only means a greater chance of them not annoying users. Once this feature is out of the testing period and is accessible to all businesses and users, it’ll be a great addition to any business’s social media strategy.

So there you have it, whether you have access to them yet or not, get cracking and develop some awesome material for promoted pins. That way, you’ll be able to get started as soon as the service becomes available!