Melissa Conlon

Pinterest, a visual search engine with over 478 million monthly active users, is a powerful platform that is often underrated and overseen by business owners when creating an effective social media marketing strategy. The opportunities and growth that can come from incorporating Pinterest into a businesses’ marketing strategy are exponential.

Pinterest is often believed to be a place for arts and crafts and inspiration, and many may deem it unnecessary to include in their marketing strategy. However, this belief couldn’t be further from the truth: Pinterest is a powerful marketing tool that every business should be taking advantage of to maximize their visibility, reach, and return on investments.

There is a vast difference between how a marketer should use Pinterest and social media platforms, like Twitter in their marketing strategy. Twitter is a social media platform that is used to interact and engage with one’s audience. Pinterest is a visual search engine that can be compared to using a search engine like Google or Bing. When creating an effective marketing strategy for one’s business, one should keep in this mind to optimize their potential on Pinterest.

A social media platform like Twitter is a great platform for businesses that can find value in providing their customers timely news reports. The fast-paced environment of Twitter give a tweet a lifespan of approximately 18 minutes, and there isn’t much that can be done about that. In contrast, the lifespan of a pin on Pinterest can be months. Pins have to do with relevancy to one’s search and interests rather than timeliness.

The growth and success that businesses can find by using Pinterest is truly unmatched. An astonishing 97 percent of searches carried out on Pinterest are unbranded. What does this mean? That the vast majority of user’s searches are not relevant to a specific brand, leaving open potential for any brand – big or small – to show up on one’s feed. This reiterates that users on Pinterest are looking for new inspiration – meaning they are open to new brands as well.

A channel that started nearly 11 years ago, it is important to note that significant growth that Pinterest has seen in recent quarters, proving it’s important to one’s marketing strategy. From the second quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021, just under a year, Pinterest has grown its audience by an astonishing 19.5 percent. This growth continues as Pinterest is adding new features and creating ways to entice more users to use their platform.

It is difficult to entice marketers and businesses to include Pinterest in their marketing strategy, especially because of its uniqueness compared to other platforms. Many people steer away from it due to confusion as to how it works. If you begin to see it more as a search engine and not a social media platform, you will gain more value and understanding out of it.

It is my hope that these statistics will at least get at least one marketer or business to consider it. The opportunities are limitless on Pinterest and I encourage everyone to incorporate it into their marketing strategy in some capacity.