Pinterest is a great social media network to leverage as part of your social media marketing strategy, but it’s important to understand when this network is an appropriate choice and what its individual strengths are before you choose to use it. Certain niches also perform particularly well on Pinterest while others are better suited to other platforms.
Strengths of Pinterest
Pinterest is a highly visual social media platform with a predominately female audience, and this tends to reflect what content performs well on the network. It has a few unique strengths, including:
- Highly visual format
- Audience primed for making purchases
- Long-lasting content visibility
- Paid ad placements
The nature of the platform makes it well-suited for showcasing visually appealing content. For this reason, content from niches like beauty, fashion, and decor is very successful. Showing attractive examples of your brand on Pinterest not only acts to advertise it but also inspires potential customers with ways they can use your products.
This is often more effective than simply explaining the benefits of a product, or how it can be used. With Pinterest, customers can get a firsthand impression of how items of clothing could be pieced together into interesting outfits, or how a beautiful piece of furniture could fit into their own home.
Other visual social media networks like Instagram can accomplish this too, but Pinterest is significantly more effective because content posted to the platform can remain relevant for much longer periods of time. Users can continue to find your pins in searches or on your boards and shared on the boards of others into perpetuity, while an Instagram post will fade from prominence and be buried by new content far sooner.
Users of Pinterest are also primed towards making purchases, as one of the key reasons people use the platform is to get ideas for products or styles they want to try. This makes it easier to gain conversions from your effort, as the people who view your content on the platform already have an intent to buy.
Finally, the ability to place ads that look quite natural and blend into other content is beneficial for any social media campaign. The modern internet user is becoming more blind to advertisements than ever before, making many kinds of ads ineffective. Ads that look less like ads alleviate this problem and offer higher value for money.
Of course, with how the platform works it’s fairly easy to gain from it without spending on paid content as well, making Pinterest a good choice for low-budget campaigns.
Should You Use It?
Given the unique benefits that Pinterest holds for social media marketers, it’s definitely a consideration to keep the platform in mind, but unfortunately not all kinds of content perform well on Pinterest.
To leverage Pinterest successfully, you need to have offerings that are visual in some way. Users of the network aim to build boards that are aesthetic to look at, and content that doesn’t fit these criteria won’t garner much attention. This also limits the kinds of niches that will work on the platform.
It is also a platform where you benefit greatly from content volume. If you can churn out a large number of original pins featuring beautiful-looking products, you will achieve greater success on Pinterest. This means you need to be able to create content for your brand or have a team in place who can do this for you.
If you only have access to a limited amount of media you can use, visibility on Pinterest is greatly limited, making it less effective for brands with limited products. There are creative ways to get around this by using the platform to showcase the same product in many different ways instead, and this is definitely something to consider.
Otherwise, if none of this is possible, a different platform may be a better consideration and offer a greater return potential. In any marketing campaign, it is important to plan accordingly around what is available to you and consider all opportunities before locking into any one option.
