Pinterest - whose using it and what do you think?

Looks to me as though it is another version of womens weekly for the internet. On the home page there's not a male name in sight. Discussions seem to be about how to make breakfast, how to arrange candles, how to make chocolate bunny butt cake, how to jazz up an old filing cabinet, more food, more food and more food.....Nothing about dieting though enough said I don't think you will be spending to much time on there unless your on a weight gain programme

If you have an amazing product and not enough money to spend on marketing, this could be really useful. According to reports, it drives more referral traffic than twitter, youtube, linkedin etc. Also people can share any pin they like on facebook, twitter etc where their friends will see and share it and so on. However 97% of facebook likes on Pinterest are made by women. So if you are selling a product appealing to men only or mostly, you lose a huge market. Also, It is not very far that automated scripts that pin loads of rubbish and spam the Pinterest to death.

Not sure if I have mentioned it yet, but, take a closer look at the TOS when you sign up. If you use affiliate links on their system, they take a cut. (Last I checked it was done without notifying you), also they tend to sell your images off as well.

It could be a good system, but they need to work on those points IMHO before it can really be an asset.

Hmmm I'm in the same boat.

I was accepted last week, I've uploaded a few posts and they've been re-pinned by a few people.

None of the things that I pinned was related to any websites were I could track the traffic that the pin created but I've read people post some ridiculous statistics about the traffic created by it.

My personal opinion is that if your business doesn't lend it's self to some form of creative or product based item then I cant see how it could drive relevant traffic to your site.

I'm still in the testing phase really, so I think we should keep this post alive so we can all trade experiences.

My main thought after reading all of these massive traffic stories is that you can channel all of the traffic you want but if people aren't carrying out your desired action at the end then it doesn't really mean anything, non of the case studys I've read have spoken about sales !! I Made up a quote, not 100% original but it is:

Traffic is vanity- Conversions are sanity

With Facebook buying Instagram for a $1billion - pictures seem to be the way forward! I can't say that Pinterest grabbed me but presume somebody has seen a valuable revenue stream somwhere...

...clearly things have moved on since this post.

Now where's that dot-com bubble gone.....

Whilst obviously tongue in cheek, it's got be said, the biggest adopters of social media are woman. This demographic is already the most important to marketers and it's only going to be even more skewed towards females. Pinterest know this, as do already successful Internet businesses - particularly in ecommerce - such as Zappos and Gilt Groupe.

I think it will be interesting to track its progress. I think it is good for online retailers as they can use it for promotions (like display new product lines, offers exclusive promotions etc) however I think it may take some time to see how consumers use this...

Has anyone got any up to date results since this thread was started?

Im just working on our social media & have been considering Pinterest. We sell high end, stylish log burners & its probably fair to say that women have the deciding factor in most of the installations we have completed so far....perhaps it is something that could aid our sales?

Any tips / success stories ...or even failures would be welcome.

Thanks

It's only a month old! Verdict seems to be a thumbs down for business, unless you are targetting women