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If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, it could aptly be described as a ‘virtual pinboard’. It’s a place where hundreds of thousands of people share images that they like, consider funny or beautiful.
Sound frivolous? Perhaps. But for many business builders, it’s a place to find out what’s popular and what consumers are thinking. In many respects, it’s just another social network, but with five killer features.
Here’s how you can take advantage of the social network.
1. Visual delight
At the outset, Pinterest set itself apart with a visual-oriented design. A grid-based layout is easy on the eye, while still providing a lot of information. Saved pins are organized into separate pages known as pinboards.
Forget hitting your audience with a wall of text. Use Pinterest to give them quick hits of inspiration — previews of your next event or a catalogue of your products. Visuals are digested much quicker than text, and are a lot more fun. Each pin can be commented on and shared on Twitter and Facebook to further broaden your reach.
2. VideoPhotos together
Uploading photos and videos of your event to the web is undoubtedly a great way to show off highlights. But up until now, you’ve had to use separate resources to store and share photos on, say, Flickr or Picasaweb, and videos on, say, YouTube or Vimeo. Even on a platform that lets you upload both like Facebook, photos and videos are stored in separate sections of your page or profile.
Pinterest offers the fresh new ability to “pin,” or save, photos and videos alongside one another.
Each pinboard that you create acts like a photo album and a video playlist in one. With Pinterest, you can create a pinboard for your event and hold all the highlights in one place, making it easier on yourself and your audience.
3. Clip as you browse
Pinterest offers a downloadable bookmarklet to add to your browser. At the click of a button, you can collect any images or videos on the page you are browsing. You can then choose the pinboard to save one (or create a new one), add a comment and finally choose whether to share it on Twitter and Facebook as well.
This makes it easy to add images and videos to your collection as your browse the web, without even visiting the site. As you read blogs about your industry, browse photo albums or highlight reels from similar events or come across great marketing ideas, you can save them with a few clicks. And because creating the pin involves choosing which pinboard to save it to, there’s no need to organize or edit your pins later.
4. Tracemarks
One of my favourite Pinterest features is the way it saves the source of each pin. Every pin retains a link to its original source. If you save an image with the bookmarklet, a link to the original page is automatically created. Thus, with no extra effort you have credited the source of the image! For businesses, this is great news, because anyone pinning your products or highlights from your event is effectively promoting your brand as well.
5. Price flags
A requirement of creating a pin is adding a comment. When pinning images of products that you will be showcasing at your event, you can use this feature to advantage by adding a price in the comment box. Using a dollar or pound symbol will automatically create a price banner across the corner of your pin, for other users to see. Saved pins can also be filtered by price, for those using Pinterest as a shopping tool.
Pinterest is still a niche network, but you can use it in many ways to promote your event. If you’re looking for some inspiration to get you started, Mashable has collected a list of 21 must-follow uses that you should check out.
Corina Mackay is a writer and social media consultant, currently working as an inbound marketing consultant for event registration service Eventarc
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