Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site in history. In the UK alone, from Sept 2011 to Sept 2012, it saw a 786% increase in visits from 902k to 7.98m. More and more brands – in both the B2C and B2B sectors – are jumping on board due to its highly effective capabilities at driving website traffic and increasing brand awareness.

What’s caught our eye at Appletree is that Pinterest have recently launched their new business pages, extending its reach to marketers, bloggers, and crucially, businesses in the B2B sector.  Pinterest cited the contribution of quality content from the business community as a reason for launching these business-specific accounts:   “Thousands of businesses have become a part of our community, giving great ideas, content, and inspiration to people on Pinterest”

Are you using Pinterest to promote your business?  Are you considering it?  We’re looking into whether it’s going to be a useful tool for us.

The first thing we did was convert our account into a business one.  (We didn’t actually use our personal one, having opened it months ago we didn’t feel it would reach our B2B audience).

Converting the account was easy, via business.pinterest.com, and the ‘Convert your existing account’ option. We now need to decide what we’re going to use it for.  Our initial objective is to use it to drive traffic to our website.  The content we publish on our other social networking sites – marketing tips and advice, is not particularly image driven, but we still want to connect and engage with people so we need to tailor the information we use.  This is where you can use Pinterest ‘boards’ and ‘pins’.  We are going to set up boards around specific topics, related to the services we offer, then use an image we have – for example a photo of our marketing schedule that sits on the wall.  Where possible we’ll post info that has value.

Another of our posts is an image of the new car the Appletree MD has bought.  Now whilst this purchase is very exciting for her, it’s not necessarily of interest to anyone else.  However, what we are going to do is launch a competition via our social media pages, to name the new car.  Here, having an image of it will be very useful.

What we need to keep in mind whilst planning our Pinterest activity is to think about our customers and ideal clients, and create boards around what they could be interested in.

I do believe Pinterest can be useful for businesses, but only if its part of planned, ongoing activity, integrated with everything else you’re doing.  If it reaches a different audience, this is good, but only if they are the right audience.  As with all our marketing activities, we’ll review and measure it to assess its effectiveness.  Have a look at our Pinterest page, we’ll blog again with the results in 2013.