Social Media: Make Pinterest Personal while Selling Products

By Marsha Collier from Social Media Commerce For Dummies

Pinterest is a very personal social media platform, but you can successfully use it for business and marketing. Photos touch people visually, and when pictures of products are interlaced with consumable ideas, the subtlety pays off.

When you follow people (and they follow you back, because they connect emotionally to your pins), they share by repinning your pins on their pages. This repinning increases the viral nature of your posts.

The images that are most shared, liked, and commented on are those that relate to the audience. Post images that resonate with you and your business. Take a look at this Pinterest page, which is shown. The creator tries to share only images that relate to her readers' lifestyle, while interspersing her business products (and Amazon items) for sale with links.

This Pinterest page has boards that should engage the author's readers.

There’s money to be made in this form of social media sharing because products you sell (and pin) can be linked back to your own website. If you don’t sell specific products, you can use Pinterest to increase your fan base by posting intriguing, relevant content. If your content is good, you increase the chance that consumers will click through your pins.

After uploading an image of an item you have for sale to Pinterest, edit the pin, and edit the link back to point to your website. In this figure, for example, the author is linking the image back to her Facebook store. If viewers like the posted item, they can click it to see it on the selling page. That’s where the commerce part kicks in.

Inserting a link to a store, where someone might buy this item.

If you have the time, Pinterest may be a profitable social media platform to try out — after you’ve conquered at least one of the others, like Facebook or Amazon.