This visual aspect of the site is one of the reasons why it has caught the attention of so many businesses, from retailers to photographers and designers, who use it as a portfolio or product catalog. Customers and clients can share what products they love and want to buy them, and their friends can show their support by pinning images to their own boards.

Use Pinterest for Business:

For businesses, Pins help people find more information about the products they want to buy. When using Pinterest for business, you should always include a link to your website with each pin, be it a blog post, online store, or company website. When comparing Pinterest to Instagram, the ability to easily add links is what sets Pinterest apart from Instagram as an effective marketing strategy. Adding links to pins makes it very easy for Pinterest users to find out more about the pin that caught their eye and possibly continue to make a purchase.

Pinterest drives 3.8x more sales than other platforms and 87% of Pinners purchased a product because of Pinterest. But with 200 million monthly users, Pinterest may not be a social media powerhouse when compared to Facebook and Instagram audiences. That's why it's important to look at who uses Pinterest and if this group matches your business's target audience!

Half of all U.S. millennials use Pinterest every month, and 66% of the global audience is female 25-54. The areas of greatest interest on Pinterest include fashion, food, auto, interiors and travel, so there are touch points for a large number of users. In terms of spending power, a recent Pinterest survey found that 93% of Pinners use Pinterest to plan purchases and 40% of Pinners have a household income of over $100,000, and for businesses, that's a massive amount of users who are willing and able to spend based on what they discover on Pinterest.

If your target audience is on Pinterest and you haven't leveraged it as part of your business strategy, you could be missing out on the chance to reach potential new customers every time they log in!

Benefits of Pinterest for Businesses:

Here are the pros of Pinterest:

• Easy traffic management:

Pinterest is fantastic for driving traffic. If you own a blog, then Pinterest is a great place for you. Creating beautiful, “pinnable” images for your blog posts and uploading them to your website can help increase your traffic. Many bloggers have seen huge amounts of traffic from Pinterest.

• Ideal for visual branding:

If you are an e-commerce, design focused or event planner, then Pinterest is for you. Pinterest is a great place for people to find and compare products.

• Conversion rate is higher:

Conversion rate on Pinterest is higher than other social media platforms. 50% of Pins say they purchased a product after seeing it advertised on Pinterest. And that's only online.

• Long Pin Lifetime Value:

Pinterest's algorithm keeps pins in circulation for a long time. If your pin is "repinned" (shared on another user's board), that pin is doubled, meaning it is twice as likely to appear in search results. Pins we posted five or six years ago still get repins and high click-through rates today.

• Users watch what they want to see:

Users have the option to follow a board or follow a user. If you follow the board, you will only see the pins that the user pins to that board. If you follow a user, you follow every single board they have. By following users, you'll see everything a user pins to each board. This means you can post a much wider variety of pins.

• Helps increase your SEO:

Pinterest profiles rank in search, which can help keep your brand just for you. Boards also rank in search, which means you can get an extra spot in search results.

Pinterest is also a very powerful traffic engine. More repins means more traffic to your site and more traffic will help you rank higher.

• It's free to see success:

Pinterest is free to set up and you can get massive amounts of re-pins and traffic without spending a dime on the site. Well-optimized pins will see high views and high repins without paying to engage. That said, Pinterest has a basic ad system if you want to see faster results.