We have heard so many things about Facebook and Twitter. There’s just no doubt that these two sites are the top social networking sites. But, we need to know that there are other good sites too! They might even get better than FB and Twitter in a few days! This blog is about one such site which has already started proving the big potential it has for marketing brands and consumers. For those who have started wondering, this is about an emerging social networking site - Pinterest.
Pinterest is a photo sharing
website. It takes social networking to the next level. You’re not gonna do it
with just 140 characters or a status update anymore! If you see a photo that
you like on the web, or if you have one in your desktop, you can upload it on
to Pinterest. These photos are called
‘Pins’. You can create a bulletin board full of photos that you like, which is
called a Board.
Once a photo is pinned, it can
soon be re-pinned by the other Pinterest users. This is how a photo or an idea
gets spread virally on the network. Just like the other networking sites, what
appears on your home page is determined by the people you choose to follow. The
interesting thing here is, you can pick and choose what all boards of a user
you want to follow rather than following all the boards of one user.
The other significant feature of
Pinterest is that, you can add photos from other websites if you have
bookmarked Pinterest on your web browser. Let’s say, you find an interesting
picture on Amazon.com. You can create a Pin for this image on Pinterest just by
clicking on the bookmark. This will also create a link to Amazon.com, where
people can find out a lot more information about it. And, when you add price to
an image like this, it will automatically create a banner for that image.
Pinterest can also be used for
collaboration, in a way. You can choose to let your friends post something on
your board. This is particularly useful when you have had a trip with some of
your friends. It is only natural that you have some photos and your friends
have some other photos of the same trip. So, when you have created a board for
the trip and when you are done posting your photos on the board, you can add
your friend’s name as a contributor to the board. He will now be able to pin
his set of photos to the board.
Pinterest is one site which has
tremendous potential. It has been around only for two years but the number of
users on this site has jumped from a few thousands to over 10 million in the
last few months. This provides an excellent platform for marketing brands and
advertising. We are now in the era of Google Ads and Facebook Ads. But, there
will soon come a time, when we will start designing a campaign for Pin-ads! One
Metric that can be used to measure the success in Pinterest is the number of
times an image gets re-pinned. It would be more valuable than the number of
impressions (on Google Ads), as these images get spread by the users
themselves.
Remember Sun-Moon-Star?
No comments:
Post a Comment