Pinterest for Promotion

Pinterest  is like a huge online store. Or at least, it drives traffic to many online stores directly and indirectly. On Pinterest, users can pin products they like or pin crafts and diy projects they might want to do later on. This opens up a great opportunity for selling products.

When someone pins a product, they also create a link to the site where they found the picture. If someone pins a product from your site, then they have just showed your product to anywhere between 10 and several hundred people. And from there it’s a domino effect, those people will repin, increasing first time and multiple time exposure of your product.  This is a great way to drive traffic to a site.  When people click on a pin on Pinterest, they are interested buyers. They want the item they are seeing. So traffic diverted from Pinterest has a high likelihood in increasing sales of an item. 

Of course pinning things you want to buy may be a bad thing for individual users, at least if you are as slow to pull the trigger on a purchase as me. I have pinned several products I was interested in buying on Pinterest, but I’m always hesitant to pin something I might actually buy. I know that once I pin something I like, I will be showing it to a bunch of other people who might purchase the product before me. By the time I decide which item I like best and has the best price, there is a good chance it will be out of stock. Though this may not be good for me, it’s obvious that online stores want to generate more sales this way. 

As a disclaimer, you should know how Pinterest generates sales. According to the ebook “How to use Pinterest for Business”, published byHubspot, Pinterest makes its money by taking a cut of sales from pinned products. They use a firm called SkimLinks to scan through pinned content on their website and see if they come from a retail site that has an affiliate program. If it finds one, Pinterest adds an affiliate code secretly and makes money off sales from that pin. This seems a bit sketchy, only because Pinterest isn’t completely upfront about their income model.

Pinterest is a new and exciting tool, not just as a social network, but as a way to drive traffic and increase business for online retailers. Businesses should sincerely consider the impact a site like Pinterest could have on its sales.

Digital Magazine Publishing

One of the coolest digital promotion tools I have discovered recently is free digital magazine publishing. This can be a great tool for businesses and organizations that are just starting out and need a way to get information out without spending tons of money. Sites like issuu.com  and yudu.com allow people to upload their files for free and share them.

 

These sites allow businesses and organizations to create magazines and newsletters that can be viewed from a variety of devices and anywhere with web access. This is good for organizations and the people they wish to reach. People get the content in an easy to use format, right to any device they have accessible and without junking up their homes with stacks of magazines and newsletter. Oh wait, did I mention it’s good for the environment?

Businesses get the advantage of being able to distribute their content on the site itself and on blogs, social media sites, and websites. The process of uploading is very easy too. This is a digital promotion solution that could work for many businesses that are heavily information focused and want to deliver content on a regular basis. This is a great tool businesses and organizations can use for say a newsletter or company magazine, installation instructions, DIY tutorials, fun guides and much more. I can see this being used as valuable tool, especially for new organizations.

YouTube in Digital Promotion

 I’ve never been a habitual YouTube user. Of course, I’ve watched music videos and seen the occasional ridiculous video on people trying to swallow cinnamon or pranking their friends. Though there is something new I’ve begun to encounter and it almost seems silly that I didn’t give much thought to it before. YouTube can be a great promotional tool for all kinds of businesses and organizations. 

They offer free video hosting, allow you to put your video on any webpage through html links, so organizations can use it as an easy way to teach consumers or put video advertisements online. And many do. I found a water fountain making company that used it as a place to host commercials and instructive videos that were linked on their site. 

Coca-Cola uses YouTube and puts the video on their main site too. They had a pretty cute video with young people (college kids) working together to make creatively engineered projects to “share a coke.” The video was funny and very relatable to people my age and younger who are still in school. Coca-Cola is a huge company that has found a way to use YouTube to its advantage. 

So what are the advantages of hosting a video on YouTube compared to just using a video player on your own site? Well for one, YouTube is free whether you’re a kid making funny videos at home or a huge company according to an article titled "YouTube vs. Self- Hosted Video: pros and cons for webmasters". Another is that you don't have to be tech savvy. YouTube will take care of that part. You don’t need to know anything about html coding or servers and if playback speed is slow or something is wrong with the server, YouTube deals with it, not one your employees. It also has a huge audience and fast playing video. A disadvantage would be that they play ads before your video, can delete it at any point because of complaints or law violations and you can lose customers to videos displayed on the panel next to yours. Visit Instantshift.com to get more information on the pros and cons of YouTube hosting.