Without a shadow of a doubt Pinterest.com is the most popular website on earth right now. It’s been hailed as the next biggest social platform, praised for the levels of growth and traffic its seen, and it’s been repeatedly covered by pretty much every tech site going (even we’ve covered it: Pinterest for Marketing. Connecting Facebook & Twitter to Pinterest).

So what’s the big deal?

Well you can read posts about how great Pinterest is for business until you go blue in the face so you don’t need another one of those. What I want to explore is the ways Pinterest won’t help your business. So here are three reasons why I don’t think you need to do Pinterest.com.

If you don’t do anything remotely creative, don’t do Pinterest

Anyone with a basic level of perception can take a glance at the Pinterest.com homepage and realise that this is a place of creativity. Whether it be with graphics, with clothing, or with crafting; the site is clearly aimed at an audience that appreciates kitsch.

Selling web hosting? Pinterest probably won’t help you. Local builders? Pinterest definitely won’t help you. Not in its current state at least.

(E.g. A quick search for ‘web hosting’ has brought up a tiny page of pins barely big enough to cover the space above the fold. Only a few of which have any sort of interaction, most being 1 repin. Not really the level of interaction that warrants maintaining an account.)

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the industry you’re in, just that Pinterest can’t necessarily offer you an audience with the right intent. Businesses will try, of course, to make Pinterest work for them and while they may be seeing some engagement at the moment while the hype around the site is at its highest, don’t expect it to last.

If social conversation is a big part of your marketing, don’t do Pinterest

The great thing about using sites like Facebook or Twitter as part of your marketing strategy is the high and pretty sophisticated level of conversation you can have with your customers/users/fans.

Comments, messages, Likes, sharing, Retweets, promotions, pages, polls, promoted Tweets, sponsored stories; the list goes on, and if anything in that brief list is a must for your company, then Pinterest probably won’t be beneficial to you.

Pinterest is not a conversational platform, and by that I mean there’s no outright space for users to simply chat. Users can comment on pins but that’s pretty much it, there’s no room for improv, if you like. If you posted an image on Facebook users have the space to engage in a discussion about the image, directly Like or reply to specific comments, and maybe link to other content that users may find relevant.

This isn’t really possible on Pinterest so don’t expect the kind of opinion based comments you see on other platforms.

If you’re looking for easy sharing functionality, don’t do Pinterest

Given that the main premise of Pinterest is to pin (share) images you love, the actual functionality to share within the site is very poor.

The only real sharing option on the site is to Tweet out an individual pin. Pins also have a Facebook Like button on them but the introduction of Facebook’s timeline profile means that your Likes aren’t actually posted to your feed, only your profile. So I guess you can constitute that are sharing if you only want to share to people who visit your profile, but for most people, that’s not good at all.

There’s no sharing options for entire boards which, given the nature of the site (projects, groups of related/similar images, Gifts etc.), seems like a bit of an epic fail on Pinterest’s part.

You also can’t share out your profile/your boards (without manually posting the URL, obviously, this applies to all of my points on sharing).

Although I’m sure better sharing functionality will be added to the site in the future but for now, unless you just want to share out individual pins, there’s very little benefit to it.

Do you agree with any of  these points? How do you feel about Pinterest for business?

We’ve already covered how you can use Pinterest.com as part of your online marketing strategy, so I thought it would be good progress to take that idea one step further and give you some tips on how you can connect Pinterest together with the rest of your social media accounts, as well as your website.

Although it might seem like a bit of a basic concept, if you’ve got a good grasp of what all the different settings do and how you can create appropriate links to your account then you’ll be able to asses which ones will benefit your social media and marketing efforts.

Connecting Pinterest.com with your Facebook Page

The biggest and easiest way to connect your Pinterest account and your Facebook account is to activate the ‘Add Pinterest to Facebook Timeline’ feature within the ‘Settings’ tab of your Pinterest profile.

Once activated, this feature will share any pinboards you follow/create, pinners you follow and most other activity on Facebook. However, there’s a slightly different way for you to share out your repins as this isn’t done automatically.

You’ll notice in your Settings that there’s another Facebook option called ‘Link to Facebook’, this actually does a couple of different things. The first thing it does is post a link to your connected Facebook account on your profile, the second thing it does is allow you to share repins quickly.

You can see from the picture that when you go to repin something you’re given the option to tick a box and share it to Facebook (and Twitter). You won’t get this option if you don’t link your accounts. It might not be auto-posting but it’s not exactly an inconvenience.

Connecting Pinterest.com with your Twitter Profile

The same option is also available to Twitter and is accessible in the same way. Activate the ‘Link to Twitter’ setting and you’ll get a link to your Twitter account on your profile as well as an option to share our individual repins from the repin screen (above).

Unfortunately, there’s not a way for you to Tweet out entire pinboards without just Tweeting out the link, but again, it’s not too much of an inconvenience to copy and paste the link if you’re happy to do it that way. You also don’t currently have the option to auto share your follows etc. as you can with Facebook’s ‘Add to Timeline’ option, however, I would image both of these will be options in the future.

Connecting Pinterest.com with your Website

There are a couple of different buttons you can use to connect your Pinterest.com account to your website, and even an image you can download for things like email signatures.

The ‘Follow Button’ works in a similar way to Twitter’s Follow button and subscribes users to your pins and pinboards. Once they’ve clicked the button they’ll see your pins on their homepage. Theres a few different types of button you can have as you can see from the picture and clicking on each one brings up its individual code. Pinterest.com says that they’ve been designed in those sizes to help webmasters incorporate them into headers and sidebars.

The ‘Pin It Button’ is a little more complicated as it allows you to specify a particular image on a page that you’d like to pin. You need to fill in the form in order to generate the code (I’ve filled in an example so you can see how it should look).

If you have multiple images on the page that you’d like to make pinnable there’s an advanced option which brings up a longer, more customisable bit of code. Although, webmasters/developers will probably step in at this point, so if you’re just the marketer or content manager then I’d guess it’s not your job to make sure this works.

The ‘Pinterest Logo’ is the final way for you to connect your website with your Pinterest.com account. There’s two different logo’s for you to choose from and the beauty of using an image is that you can link it to whichever part of your account you want.

Like I mentioned earlier, buttons are probably a better idea if you want to get followers but if you want to link to your account from your email signature or from a newsletter then using the logo and pointing it to your profile could work really well.

So those are the main ways you can connect your Pinterest.com account to your website and your social networks. If you want a little more detail on how you can use Pinterest.com for marketing check out our post: Using Pinterest.com as Part of Your Online Marketing Strategy.