There’s no denying that Pinterest is a big hit. But, can it help your business? Pinterest is drawing plenty of traffic and attention from casual and serious users alike. But is it a good tool for more than just sharing cat pictures and admiring DIY crafts? Marketing with Pinterest for small businesses is becoming the way to go, allowing companies to make connections with customers they never could have reached otherwise. Using Pinterest to connect businesses to new customers is the reality of social networking.

According to Mashable, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. Driving huge amounts of traffic to retailers’ sites via pinned products and photos, the three-year-old social bookmarking site is an incredible way for small online businesses to drive traffic to their stores.

The pin board site has the advantage of being a content aggregator that allows its users to customize their own profile of interests by pinning items, “looks”, or products that they are interested in. This allows for naturally curated content that accurately reflects the buying and browsing habits of its users.

The user base for Pinterest is overwhelmingly a younger, more tech-savvy crowd that tends to scan quickly for information rather than read. Infographics are a great way to communicate more than a photograph to potential customers, as does a clearly designed home or landing page for your business or shop.

Pinterest for business marketing makes sense for small business (although some large retailers do very well with traffic from Pinterest as well) as search is often a less efficient method of connecting customers and small companies than social networking.

One of the best ways to use Pinterest is to treat it as a focus group and a crowdsourcing resource. Running contests, promoting a theme of items for a lifestyle, or asking users to interact in some way is an excellent way to get and maintain customer attention. ModCloth, a relatively small online retailer, garners most of its web traffic by word of mouth and social networking, relying on sites like Pinterest to share pictures of their merchandise.

Pinterest provides a great opportunity to see the interests and affinities of a large cross section of potential customers. Using Pinterest for marketing creates a great chance for marketers and business owners to change the way they organize their merchandise and reach out to new groups based on what those shoppers are already looking for.

1 Mashable 2012/02/01/pinterest-traffic-study/

2 Mashable 2012/01/29/pinterest-retail-infographic/