I wanted to talk today about something we don’t talk about very much. I have called it my social media secret weapon for many years, you might know it as Pinterest. There are so many benefits from Pinterest and so many people just do not do it. 

Let me just throw a couple of quick stats at you so you’ll understand why Pinterest is so important. It has over 150 million users. 48% of shoppers say they purchase based on stuff they’ve seen on Pinterest. 80% are female. Pinterest users tend to have a higher income level. Pinterest gets more referral traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Google+ combined. It generates traffic more quickly to your website than any other resource. 

What does this mean for you? It means you need to be on Pinterest, especially if you’re in a very visual industry like real estate or weddings. I can tell you from my own personal Pinterest. I have 5,000 followers; not a lot, but my little 5,000 followers generate 36,000 monthly viewers. 36,000. That is 5x the referrals based on the users I have. I get insane traffic, just from Pinterest and a lot of my vendors do. 

We do audits and we look at Google Analytics and we review marketing information so we can make sure we’re making the best suggestions for our clients. When it comes to Pinterest, hands down, every single time look at it, they’re killin’ it. I’d had customers who have had 25,000 followers on Facebook and their little tiny Pinterest audience is killing their website referral because more people click through from Pinterest than Facebook.  

What it comes down to a lot of the time is that women are your decision makers for purchasing. I don’t like to say women are your shoppers, everybody shops, but women buy and they have the money to do that. Hello, we run half the world, right? So you have women making money, who make a higher income, who are looking for suggestions for purchases. They’re already in the buying mindset so now they’re shopping on Pinterest so they can find what they need. 

You can pin from your Instagram account, did you know this? All that cool stuff that takes so much time to create for Instagram? You can repurpose it over and over. So if you have a branded board and you have all these cool quotes we can turn around and pin that to a Pinterest board. It’s great for traffic referral! If people click on those images it takes them right back to your Instagram so it keeps them in your loop, which is exactly what you want to do. 

I think most people get confused. Social media is not a sales platform, it is a know-like-trust platform. People are not going to follow you off of Instagram to go buy something until they know you and they like you and they trust you. Pinterest is huge for that. You can pin from Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, your blog — as long as it’s solid information and it has a good point of referral. Pinterest is great, GREAT, for your website traffic. 

I have steadily been growing my Pinterest account for many years, which is why I have 5,000 followers. I don’t post anything special or fancy. As a matter of fact, if you go look at my account I use it as a parking lot for other stuff. You can tell who we work with because there are boards for ice cream and real estate and health and fitness because I go park information for content for later. I get some great inspiration for content for Facebook or Instagram, content for my live videos because it’s a great search engine. The coolest thing about it is I can go and look at a pin and tell you how many people have liked it or pinned it so I can tell you if it’s popular before you ever use the content, which is awesome. 

I’m very big into Pinterest. I love it and I think that everybody should do it. You can make big headway on Pinterest if you’ll just do it a few minutes a day. Five pins a day is life changing. 30 pins a week — huge. 60 pins a week? Amazing. I joke around a lot and tell people, if you haven’t seen me on Pinterest in two days, call the police! So, Pinterest. It really is a secret weapon!