The belle of the social media ball is Pinterest. Its growth rate has been rather phenomenal, and I can personally attest to its abililty to capture my attention (and my time) through crowd-sourced engaging imagery.
…but should you be using it? It’s a tough one to say. This infographic from Intuit offers a quick opinion on whether Pinterest is in your business’ best interest. There’s more to it than “I think I can”… you have to think about the risks and rewards.
Reasons to join Pinterest and start actively marketing on it include:
- Popularity – Pinterest has a huge growth curve, and has proven to be quite engaging
- Visual medium – medicine is often a visual medium. Pinterest certainly leads the race when it comes to delivering visually appealing content
- Blazing the way – if your business uses Pinterest, it can certainly establish itself as a leader in that marketing medium.
…but there are reasons to be wary as well. Reasons that using Pinterest is dangerous include:
- Copyright – Users of Pinterest have been accused of being flagrant and unapologetic copyright violators. Know that if you don’t create your own imagery, you may not have the right to post it on Pinterest.
- Visual medium – this is not a typo. A visual medium like Pinterest does not lend itself to business promotion like Facebook or Twitter do. You’ll have to think carefully about what sort of images will represent your brand AND be interesting enough for Pinterest.
- Brand identity – If you don’t have an extremely firm sense of your business’ brand, then it’s easy to get lost in creating ‘interesting’ imagery for Pinterest without doing yourself any favors by promoting your business.
There are certainly lots of opinions either way. Know that we’re watching the network carefully. We’ll be sure to alert you as soon as we’ve identified a way to safely, effectively market using it.
If you have more questions about how we can help your customer communications on social media, just give us an email or a call.
