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.