If you’ve been struggling with getting traffic to your website, Pinterest just may be the solution you seek. Pinterest has over 150 million active users and accounts for 5% of all website referral traffic, second only to Facebook out of social media network traffic referral. It’s the #1 driver of traffic to my website and accounts for 70% of my social media referral traffic.
If those numbers don’t convince you, maybe these 3 other benefits will:
It’s more search engine than social network
Pinterest is used unlike any other social media network. It’s much more data/content driven then brand/social/popular/entrainment driven. People go to Pinterest to do research, get inspiration, and collect information.
Engagement in terms of commenting and liking is not a huge part of the network. You can basically pin a pin and forget it! When posting on other networks you should really revisit those posts and comment back. In Pinterest you don’t have to schedule in additional time for follow-up, so posting is your main time investment once you get your profile and boards set-up.
*Pinterest does have a comment component, but I’ve rarely gotten many genuine comments via that method.
Your pins keep working long after you post
Seriously, this is the best reason! A pin you pin today can keep working for years for you. Nope years is not a typo.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret, I have a hobby blog that hasn’t been updated in two years that still gets 100s of views a day, and the main driver of that is Pinterest.
According to this infographic, the average life of a tweet is 15 minutes, a Facebook post 5 hours, and Instagram 24 hours…Pinterest’s average life of a post is 4 months. Researching a bit further seemed to back up these numbers, with some debate on Pinterest. This article pulls an example of a pin a year later getting 1000s of repins.
Pinterest can easily give you the biggest bang for your time investment.
Your reach goes beyond your followers
You can have a pin go viral and it has nothing to do with the number of your profile followers at all. Your reach on Pinterest is not determined heavily upon what your profile follower number is. And since pins have such long lives, a viral pin or popular pin can bring you consistent traffic for months and months (maybe even years).
You don’t even have to have a profile for you site to get traffic from Pinterest, just pinnable images. So think about how much better your reach could be if you make sure to circulate your own content.
With pay to play pressure taking over Facebook, and Facebook owning Instagram Pinterest can be a good alternative especially for a beginning business to reach a wider audience without having to have a large advertising budget.
