I recently picked up a copy of a new Pinterest ebook on Amazon while it was on sale for free. It’s been a while since I did a book review, so I thought I would review this one. Pinterest For Business: Why Does My Business Need to Use Pinterest was broken down into 9 chapters with the primary purpose of answering the question in the subtitle.
One thing I can say about this book, if you already know you should be using Pinterest for your business and are looking for advice on how to implement it, this probably isn’t the book for you, although Chapter 8 — Pinterest and Your Marketing Campaigns does touch on that topic a little.
The book does a pretty good job of explaining what the heck Pinterest is (a virtual collection of Pinboards… basically Flickr where you can share other people’s images) and, more importantly the reasons why businesses should have a presence there.
Pinterest is currently the fastest growing social media site out there, with 12 million users signing up while the site was still in beta. It receives over 11 million weekly visits of highly active users.According to the book,the average Pinterest user spends up to 100 minutes on the site.
Chapter 5 mentions the potential for “going viral,” the idea that your work will grow well beyond yourself. Excellent examples of things going viral include that house with the Christmas lights that flashed in time to the TSO song, “Christmas Eve in Sarajevo” or the Korean music video “Gangnam Style” by PSY (I still have that song stuck in my head!)
Not quite viral, but when I first signed up for Pinterest a couple weeks ago to “pin” images of the food I’ve cooked for If You Can Read, You Can Cook, I was surprised to learn that some of them already were on the site! This was also before I added Pinterest to my social sharing plugin on that site, so whoever pinned those images was very interested in sharing them!
As I mentioned earlier, the book doesn’t give that much detail on how to use Pinterest for your business, but it does give some tips. For instance, I learned from this book that you can affix prices to images. Take a picture of your product, Pin it, and slap a price on it and people can actually discover your products through Pinterest and go to your site to buy them!
It also discusses some strategies for using Pinterest for inbound marketing and it’s place in your sales funnel. It also recommended using infographics to convey textual information.
If you are on the fence about Pinterest, then this book may give you the information you need to take the plunge. If you are looking for more concrete tips on how to get the most out of using the site, then you’ll probably want to keep looking.
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