Pinterest: Like Virtual Window Shopping

By Jeri T Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist, Denner Group International   4-28-2012

Takeaways: Pinterest is equivalent to virtual window shopping. It’s the fastest-growing social media site on the web, driving more traffic than Facebook and YouTube combined.

A quote by Industrial designer Paavani Bishnoi in the article, Why Women are Pinterested, Daily News & Analysis, caught my attention: “I no longer feel like logging in to Facebook when I am bored. I do not want to know what others are doing this minute. Twitter is all about giving an opinion. Pinterest, on the other hand, is relaxing. It’s just about sharing good stuff. It’s like window shopping on the laptop.”

For those unfamiliar with Pinterest, it’s the hottest new social sharing site on the internet allowing you to create virtual boards of pictures and videos around a particular theme.

My pinboards are eclectic because I have many interests – from gluten free cooking to personal growth and development, to art and spirituality.

Pinterest Users are Mostly women

Studies show that 80% of Pinterest users in the US are women between the ages of 25 and 54 (30% are between 25 and 34 years of age). Perhaps that’s because women tend to be more visual than men and are accustomed to creating “vision boards” of pictures and magazine clippings around a theme. 

Hubspot’s April 13, 2012 blog puts Pinterest as the 3rd most popular social networking site in the US in terms of traffic. As of February this year, the site had accumulated more than 10.4 million unique users.

Personally, I think it depends on what one “pins” to their virtual boards. I see more and more men re-pinning my pins and following me – so it definitely depends on the contents you’re sharing. Women may have started the trend, but I see men and businesses catching on quickly to this new traffic-generating site.

The latest statistics I’ve seen say that Pinterest is driving more traffic to websites than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn combined. That’s huge!

There are no restrictions that prevent a business from putting up a corporate Pinterest site with pinboards of their products. The advantage is that you can not only display pictures of your products, you can create short how-to videos that demonstrate how to use them, put them together, etc., and a price. When you put a price in the caption, Pinterest slaps it diagonally across the upper left corner. It’s attention-getting. Add a link to your website or shopping cart, and you can generate sales right from Pinterest.

My prediction is that entrepreneurs have the rest of 2012 to take advantage of this before the big guns get on board. Afer that, we’ll see more and more corporate Pinterest sites using this to create revenue streams, advertise their products and drive traffic to their websites. And much of that will be driven by men, since men still occupy the bulk of the C-Suite offices.

So make rain while you can, ladies! Let’s have some fun with this and generate income, too!