What is Pinterest and Why You Should Be Using it

Pinterest as it name implies allows users to pin their interest to a virtual board. Founded in March 2010, it is based on the social network platform in which users get to share pins as well as discover other people’s pin in their virtual board. The Pinterest also have an app version and is free to be downloaded into your smartphones. The Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp designed Pinterest to be like this big catalogue of ideas and articles in the internet that have variety of topics and interests.

Users will pin their collection of interest to their virtual board so that other people in their circles can also discover and share the information into their board. Pinterest can be categorized as a Social Media platform as they are similar to Instagram in which you can either follow other Pinterest users or allow yourself to be followed by others. Whatever website, blog that you shared on the board in your Pinterest will be seen by your followers.

So, what is the difference between Pinterest and other social media platform such as Instagram? The unique feature of Pinterest is that the information you shared is basically what you found on the internet and not much about your status or what you are currently doing like in Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat.

With Pinterest you basically either sharing contents you have created in your blog or sharing other people’s contents that you found interesting. The way the board works in Pinterest is it that can be organized according to interest and topics. This is also one of the Pinterest unique feature that other Social Media platform do not have.

So, why should you be using Pinterest? Pinterest has a 100 million monthly active users and that is a huge traffic. Study shows that how-to articles, tutorials, guides and recipes have higher click through rate from Pinterest users. If you are managing a website that offers services or products, one of the best way to attract organic users from Pinterest is through sharing How-to articles with high quality images.

Pinterest is also the best place to target specific niche market or niche audiences. This is because Pinterest categorized interest to specific board. Pinterest have stated in their blog that almost 300 million boards created by Pinterest users are in Fashion category. 130 million boards created are categorized under Home Décor. 30 million boards are categorized under education for kids.

Study have also shown that Pinterest have a large female audience following. Infographics also is popular in Pinterest and will get a higher click through rate. You can drive traffic from repurposing your blog content to Infographics and pin it to your board.

These unique features that Pinterest have compared to other Social Media platform will only grow stronger from time to time. Study have also shown that Pinterest users have doubled since 2012. This shows promising future for Pinterest as one of the major Social Media platform for the growing social media user base.

So, how does Pinterest works? Here we are going to show you a general overview of how Pinterest works.

Step 1

Browse any website or blog. Once you found an article or blog that is interesting and also have a Pinterest button share, you can pin this article to Pinterest. Just tap on the Pinterest share button.

Step 2
You will be redirected to Pinterest website. If you are browsing using your smartphone and have a Pinterest app, the Pinterest will automatically open. You will then need to choose a board. Pick a board that the articles categorically falls into.

If you want to pin an article on the Social Media category, either you create a board on Social Media or find a board with that category. Once you pick a board to pin, you have now successfully pin an article to Pinterest.

RE-PINNING FROM PINTEREST

Step 1
Besides pinning articles from the internet, you can also re-pin a pin from other Pinterest users. The first step is to open and browse through Pinterest to find interesting pin.

Step 2
Once you found an interesting article, tap on the ‘Save’ button to pin that article to your board.

Step 3
You need to choose a board for that article or to create a new one if does not fit into any category in your board.

Step 4
The article is successfully pin and the feed will be shown to your followers and other Pinterest users a well.