Pinterest as a marketing tool
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 2:29PM 
Pinterest has been making a little bit of a splash in the social media sphere. It’s pretty, visual and for people who love images it can be a fun place to spend a little time. But is it any good as a marketing tool?
There is already a whole website dedicated to marketing on Pinterest, consultants are of course looking at ways of capitalising on it, from marketing to attracting new sales leads, people are coming up with numerous ways of utilising the free social media tool. I have always believed that not every organisation has to be on every social network to be effective, so I don’t think it will work for everyone, but there are some cool ways I have seen it being used for promotional purposes.
Sharing events
So we have a fun run and the images are popping up on the bloggers websites that we have engaged, there are also images on our website and on the website of the organisers.
Pinterest gives us a handy and relatively quick way of pulling all of this together. When we come across the website where the images feature, we pin it onto the board of the fun run and voila, we have a collection of images that tell the story of the day.
Visual Story Telling
We all know that mixed media is more engaging than simple text (I say this while I write a text post). While I dreamt up this example I drifted to the public sector, an organisation such as the NHS. Let’s say there is a national awareness campaign and during which, all the trusts are responsible for designing their individual campaign, under a unified message. Pinterest could be used to pull together all the trusts designs and posters etc. into an easy to manage single collection.
An Online ‘social’ Portfolio / Catalogue
Let’s take the marvellous creatives for this one. You have a portfolio website but you want quick snappy content you can use within your social media presences. You could essentially use Pinterest as a way of showing off your work, pinning concept designs and final designs onto the site, almost creating a live, social portfolio.
These are just a few examples I dreamt up while I was thinking about Pinterest. I use it to pin marketing campaigns I like, Infographics on fundraising and communications and little interesting things I like to look at, which I also hope other people will find useful and interesting. I am still not completely caught in the pinning of images, I am playing with it and using it sparingly but there is no doubt it has potential. It may not work for every organisation, but it could be used simply to create a bank of information that people in your sector may find useful, or a product catalogue or whatever it may be.
But again, like every social media marketing hype that exists, there are already eBooks, strategies and everything else coming out. I don’t believe it needs its own strategy, all social media marketing should fall as part of your overall marketing strategy, after all, it is just another way of sharing content, the biggest part of it is what content you share.
