What Is Pinterest?

If you like playing around on social media websites – and who doesn’t? – then you might like playing around on a new up-and-coming site called Pinterest.

Here’s a website that is heavily graphic and has quite a bit of potential to provide small businesses with some branding power, reputation management, and search engine optimization all in one whack. And you can do all of that without promoting yourself. All you have to do is save and share stuff you find interesting on the Internet.

I’ll use the pinboard of a popular social media news site called Mashable as an example.

If you look at Mashable’s pinboard you’ll notice a few things. Let’s start with the URL:

1. pinterest.com/mashable/ – See how it has the brand name in it? You can do the same thing with your pinboard. Brand it with your company name and make it yours. That’s some pretty hefty branding power.
2. Logo – On the top left of the pinboard you’ll see Mashable’s big logo. Can your imagine your logo set right where the page visitor’s eyeball naturally moves on first landing? That’s another powerful branding element.
3. Website URL – Below that logo is Mashable’s URL, a link to its website. There’s an inbound link that you can use for search engine optimization purposes. It’s a powerful link in a great location on the page and if you use Pinterest well, you could see some inbound traffic from that link.
4. Pins – Finally, the content. If you take a look at the content pinned on Mashable’s pinboard, very little of it is actually Mashable’s own content. The Mashable page is full of content that is either pinned originally or re-pinned from another Pinterest user’s pinboard. But – and here’s the crispy catch – each pin also links back to the Mashable website. That’s another great branding element and SEO feature.

If you’re one of those social media users that would use a site like Pinterest to spam everything that’s all about you, you won’t find much success there. That’s actually against their guidelines. You’d be better off pinning other people’s content and building up a solid reputation as a Pinterest user who shares great content of interest to others. When you do that, you’ll attract great followers and great followers may very well become great customers.

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