Most small businesses have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, but Pinterest? Probably not. Pinterest indeed has a smaller audience and is a bit of an outlier, doing things differently. As a matter of fact, Pinterest is rather misunderstood. Perhaps it is more of a niche platform.

So, does that mean it may be an opportunity for small businesses that the other big platforms cannot match?

To begin with, Pinterest is not a social media platform, not really. That often comes as a shock to people, but unlike the others, the main purpose of Pinterest is not to chat, build followers, or make a fortune with ads. It turns out that generally speaking, ads on Pinterest are frowned upon.

What Pinterest is, however, is a visual search engine, but not like Google or Bing, which primarily return text results. Pinterest Search on the other hand, returns images. Of particular interest is that those images become ideas and inspirations.

Search returns are presented as Pins: small, usually vertical images that display well on a mobile phone. Most of those images also include some short text to help form those ideas into inspirations. Yes, other search engines let you search for images as well, but those returns are just images and the journey ends there.

Pinterest also provide a convenient way to save these images in a visual way. You can think of it as a visual collection for all your inspirations. That is what sets Pinterest apart, but also makes it so incredibly valuable for small businesses. Let’s take a closer look.

How to Use Pinterest

As you search and browse around, you can save your Pins on what Pinterest calls a Board – think of it like the old office Pin-Board where you used to hang vacation postcards and things you needed to remember. From within the Pinterest Boards, you can go straight to the ideas by clicking on each Pin which takes you to that Pin’s web or social media page. You can save your Pins for later viewing. As your Board grows, it becomes a collection of ideas, but this is a visual collection made up of images.

Before Pinterest, if you wanted to save a collection of recipes you found online, you would create a document first. You would then carefully copy each recipe into it, with nested folders, headings, an index, etc. You might include an image, but that was always a hassle. Over time, this collection of recipes would become cluttered. Finding that one recipe you needed at any one time would also be difficult.

With Pinterest, your recipes are saved as pictures, which makes them easy to find quickly. You can have as many recipe Boards as you like, one for baked goods and others for main dishes or sauces. You can group them together and they can be segmented if they become too large. You now have a visual collection of your recipes.

Boards can also be seen by others when you make them public, so that they can then add recipes to your Board that they think you might like. From within the Board, you can also share your recipe Pins back out to others by placing these in their boards. Those are then called re-Pins.

You can add a comment or two, but generally, just the sharing of the image is enough. This is one of the unique ways that trends grow on Pinterest: they do not require an explanation at all. That is actually the norm on Pinterest. This way, ideas can spread very fast from board to board without very much extra work on the part of the people sharing the Pins: it is the image that serves as the main explanation, not the additional text.

You can also create your own Pins, which is also made very simple. If you have created your own recipe for holiday cookies, for example, you can easily create a Pin for that recipe. You take a picture of the baked cookies, add some text to the image (not mandatory), and up it goes onto your Board as well as onto other Boards.

Clever advantages of Pinterest

Pinterest is unique in that it is widely used by a specific demographic. To begin with, Pinterest is primarily used by women. According to Ignite social media,

https://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-networks/pinterest-demographic-data/

80% of Pinterest users are women. While there are many theories about why this is, the underlying demographic breakdowns are more revealing.

Most Pinterest users are stay-at-home people, especially parents (which is likely why such a large number are women). These parents are looking for ideas on everything from how to paint a bathroom to how to dress their kids for school. Yes, they could do this research on Google or YouTube, but Pinterest is more convenient, quick, and so much more visual.

Some of the other interesting stats are that users are generally 20-40 years old, active, family-minded, and community-oriented. They are makers, DIY-types, and they tend to be ambitious. They are fellow collectors of ideas, and they are open to sharing those ideas with others.

One of the unique features about this sharing concept is that it is thoughtful and tends to be devoid of sensationalism and hyperbole. It’s meant to be informational and utilitarian. This is because Pinterest is a visual platform, which requires a different thought process before it is posted, in contrast to a quick, misspelled tweet or regrettable emoji. To be sure, there are Pins about people’s opinions, but they are always tempered with some creative thinking about why this should be shared with the world.

Pinterest just isn’t like a social media platform for communicating with text. Instead, that sharing occurs visually and as a result seems to be calmer - it almost feels like it is intended to be a safe place. Sharing is fast, easy, and frequent, but it is also thoughtful.

One could almost go so far as to say that the reason people are on interest is because it is not social media. Instead of just watching or reading something, the interface makes collecting and sharing the goal. Think of it like a break from social media.

Another interesting aspect about the users is that they are also more likely to purchase online. This may seem odd because ads are rare on Pinterest, but it has to do with the fact that users are more engaged, or rather differently engaged than they would be on other social media. There is a sense that it is a bait-and-switch-safe space.

For example, if a user is going to save a collection of Pins on how to remodel a home-office, then they are also likely to purchase similar items/services as described in those Pins. Everything from the brand of the paint on the walls, to the tech used, to the accountant verifying the tax-write-off, it can all be included on that Board. This gives those businesses an opportunity to show off their quality as long as that Board exists.

Thins brings me to one more final point about Pinterest: there is no time limit or reason to rush. Unlike other platforms where content is continuously disappearing, on Pinterest is stays as long as the user keeps it there. Users don’t feel pressured to rush, compete, or outsmart anything. All that they have collected is still there the next time they log in.

Why this is a good fit for small businesses

Obviously, small businesses want their own products and services shared widely. The problem for many small businesses is that they have always focused on being text-based because that is what Facebook, Linked In and Twitter dictated. This creates a fight to be seen on the top of Google searches.

Unfortunately, Google is not easy for small businesses to penetrate. While some products and services do occasionally manage to make it near the top of a Google search, this is typically short-lived. The main reason for this is that they must compete with much larger businesses that can afford to pay for higher ranking. That competition is expensive and small businesses typically cannot compete, so they find themselves further down the searched list.

Pinterest is a visual site, so initially, it may not seem like a good option for small businesses, mostly because they are not initially focused on being visual. For example, a small blog site business might not think of itself as being visual, after all a blog is usually text-based. However, every article typically has an image, often several. With some thought about how to use these, it is just a matter of formatting those same images into Pins.

What is also key, is that many Pinterest users also happen to be involved in small side-ventures themselves – it is a hangout for part-time income earners, home-based businesses owners, small-time operators and anyone just starting with their own businesses. Since Pinterest users are already the DIY type as mentioned above, this also applies to creating their own businesses. There are even whole boards dedicated to this very topic.

The fact is that the Pinterest demographic overlaps quite a bit with the gig economy, even if they do not always consider themselves gigsters (they are, but I digress). On our own Gig-Zine.com site, we provide useful info for “entrepreneurs, home-based businesses, delivery drivers, artists, and everyone not working a 9-5,” as it says on our home page. That just so happens to overlap with the Pinterest demographic as well.

It should also be mentioned that on our site, we have seen a significant increase in traffic since we started creating and sharing Pins on Pinterest. This has certainly required some dedicated work, but it has paid off. This is vastly different from when we started sharing on other social media platforms, and it certainly was not the ROI from Facebook, Twitter, or Linked in. While these other platforms do provide a bump on some articles, this is typically short-lived. With Pinterest, the growth is consistent and doesn’t taper off.

Clearly there is a lot of synergy between the Gig-Zine.com and Pinterest, and this could be the same story for your small business. We realize that not all businesses can be visual in the same way, but if you are already breaking your back creating fresh content for Instagram, then you should really give Pinterest a closer look.

Conclusion

The conventional wisdom is that if you are going to use social media for your business, you should begin with one platform and become an expert at it. The biggest mistake small businesses make is that they try to be on all the popular platforms. That is a tremendous amount of work and not recommended.

The sad truth is that the big social media platforms are all saturated. A small business cannot stand out from the crowd when that crowd is too large. Bigger businesses can simply drown them out because they can afford to pay for more exposure. For most small businesses, the effort there is going to just be a momentary blip on the radar, but very difficult to sustain.

Pinterest is not small, but it also is not one of the bigger players out there. As such, small businesses are not drowned out. It also has an interface that is friendlier to small businesses. Even with few followers, a small business can still thrive because those followers are typically more engaged. If nothing else, Pinterest is also a great place to start collecting ideas into your own Boards.