By Mitch Carson

Pinterest is a social media network with a focus on users posting photos or videos (called ‘pinning’ on the service) to their own or others ‘pinterest boards’, which are a collection of usually similarly themed ‘pins’.

While it is not as large as some other social media services, with just over 150 million active users, it has a specific and fairly unique advantage in terms of usefulness for business purposes. That advantage is the focus itself, because a majority of Pinterest users are browsing with the intent of purchasing, which can make it fairly essential for marketing purposes.

And while predominantly a female-based user base, Pinterest recently made efforts to increase their draw with potential male users, raising their overall male user base to about 40 percent of the total, meaning any business can find a use for marketing through Pinterest, regardless of target demographic.

With the advent of various social media platforms, it’s no longer just celebrities who can influence trends in fashion, beauty, and other areas. More and more, ‘regular’ people are becoming minor celebrities simply by talking about their interests, on Facebook, YouTube, and other social media sites. They write blogs and make videos about applying makeup, or hairstyles and colors, or any of a million other things that can be shared online. They can have hundreds of thousands of followers who eagerly await the next blog, photoset, or video. This makes some of these digital celebrities quite influential when talking about or creating trends.

One way in which this can be and has been useful for marketing purposes can be seen in the case of Becca Cosmetics, which has partnered with several different internet personalities to create guest boards attached to their overall profile which are completely curated by those personalities, which increases traffic. Another advantage to this type of scenario is that contracting with influencers to promote their guest boards on their other social media platforms will increase traffic from their specific fan base to those guest boards and, through that, to your company profile. In addition, searches for those influential pinners will bring up your brand, placing your products in front of potential buyers.

It is vital, of course, to choose people who actually are and will continue to be influential in your field in order for this tactic to work. There are many ways to artificially inflate the number of followers a particular person has, so a better way to find the right people for this would be to ask them about their engagement rate. The right people for the job will know this number, and you will want those with the highest engagement rates.

A similar tactic for marketing through Pinterest is by allowing the users to help generate content for your company profile. The most successful brands currently on Pinterest are posting new pins an average of at least five times a day and in many cases quite a lot more. The advantage of creating user generated content boards is that you will in effect be getting free content from the people following you brand, freeing you to pursue other facets of your business.

Jewelry company Mejuri utilizes this ability with their board ‘Styled By You’, which is filled with content sent in by their customers. This gives Mejuri a great deal of high-quality content, and it also allows potential customers to see their products being worn by other customers instead of models.

The most effective way to curate a board for user generated content is to create a private board accessible only by you and your marketing team, and then repin the best content to a public user generated content board. This allows the company total control over the quality of pins.

Another method for using Pinterest in your marketing is the soft sell approach on Pinterest boards by way of demonstrations. The hair care brand OUIA, for example, has a beach wave board full of different ways to create the beach wave hair style. This soft sell approach can be effective because even though OUIA isn’t directly marketing, they make a point of mentioning the use of their products in creating these styles.