Use Pinterest to grow your business

Although Facebook and Twitter are seemingly the powerhouse platforms when it comes to social commerce, there is a platform that is on the rise to possibly challenge them for top spot one day and that is Pinterest.

You may think that Pinterest is only a platform that allows you to improve your own social standing by sharing personal images, when in fact, Pinterest can be a great way to help drastically improve your business.

Before you decide to embark on a campaign to increase your business's profile through Pinterest, you first need to look at what your online store sells and who your target demographic is. 87% of all people who use Pinterest are female, so if you run an online store than sells products primarily to men, Pinterest most likely isn't going to be a worthwhile platform to promote your business. However, if for example, you run an ecommerce or eBay store that sells women's clothing and accessories, this is the perfect platform for you for a number of reasons:

1) With 87% of the audience being female, there is going to be a huge user base that are your demographic and will be interested in what you have to sell.

2) Pinterest allows you to pin various images of products from your store to the site for other people to see. This gives you a free way to advertise your products to a huge audience, allowing them to gain an interest in what you sell. When you pin the image of a product to the site, Pinterest states that this image was pinned by you. This means that when someone selects the image, they are then able to navigate from the image to your own profile. For there they can then select your online store's web address to visit your store and purchase the item.

3) While Facebook and Twitter both also allow you to post information and images for other people to see, on average people tend to spend an hour longer on Pinterest than they do on Facebook and 41 minutes longer than Twitter. The longer people spend on Pinterest, the greater chance they have of locating your product images and your profile page.

4) If a user comes across a image of one of your products and they like the look of it, they can then "Repin" the image to allow everyone linked with their profile to then see the image. This amplification of your product images will allow for a whole new cluster of people to see your images, increasing interest and brand awareness for your store.

5) Pinterest also allows you to follow other businesses that sell similar products to what your online store provides. This allows you to keep track of how their business is going and also see any new products that they have released via the images they have pinned.