Pining For Pinning?

Have A Look At These 11 Pinterest Alternates

By Chris Sheehy | Sidewalk Branding Co.

You read it everywhere – pinning on Pinterest is great for business.  From increasing brand awareness and customer engagement to making more sales, Pinterest is a proven powerhouse.

“Pinning” as it is called, refers to the posting of files to a sharing website – Pinterest being the market leader.  These files are usually images, but could be documents, pdf files, or video.  For this article – I will focus on images, as they are most common.

Think of pinning as an electronic corkboard for your pictures, video, and letters – but with messaging & sharing capabilities –get the picture now?

Referred to as “pins”, images could be downloaded from your computer or easily taken from websites through a simple clipping/pinning tool called a bookmarkelet – my toolbar is full of them.  These pinned images are displayed on themed pages (Cars, Trucks, The Shop...whatever) commonly referred to as boards.

Everything posted is free for others to see – and if they like what they see, viewers can share your pinned images with their followers.  Essentially, one can build a team of business ambassadors who are just pining for your next board post to help spread your message to the world.

That’s how you’re using Pinterest right now – isn’t it?

Pins usually guide the viewer to a website destination either by linking the image to your website or by listing your website URL within the description box.  So pinning as it turns out, could actually be a search engine marketing tool for your businesses.  Judging by the popularity of Pinterest, your efforts could pay huge dividends!

Whether an auto dealership, auto body shop, tire store, or B2B vendor – pinning is a great way to share your brand & stories.  In addition, by including these links pointing back to your website (aka: linkbuilding) pinning could even elevate your ranking on search engines, thus drawing more organic online-visibility to your business.

Admittedly, most businesses I speak with see the enormous potential of pinning, but struggle with finding things to pin – so here are some suggestions to consider:

• Exterior & interior shots of your building
  • TIP: Think of that one spot at your business (inside or out) where you stand and think to yourself “Man, this place is awesome!” That’s your anchor image!
• Detail pictures of the things around your business 
• The things you do, make, service, serve, fix, buy, or sell
  • Your happy customers enjoying these things
  • Your happy staff doing these things
  • Your company celebrating these things
• Your money shot
  • Logo, signage, mailers & postcards, business card, website screenshots
• If the pressure of taking your own pictures freaks you out - consider hiring a photographer for the day.

And do not forget to share & like the pins from your followers that match your business values & mission – that’s the social side of marketing.

Now unless you’ve been living on the space station the past couple years, I don’t think I have said anything yet that you haven’t already read or heard – these points are headline material every day. 

But what you might not know is that Pinterest is not the only game in town.

Yep – it’s true, while Pinterest has the most market-share (for now), there are many more pinning sites worthy of consideration for both universal pinning (like Pinterest) as well as for niche market pinning too - like pinning sites just for guys!

No doubt about it – pinning is powerful! (read the full article)

About:

Chris Sheehy is an auto industry veteran with twenty-five+ years, has been published internationally within the automotive, auto body, insurance, and marketing industries and is the founder of Auto Body Consulting Group, a sister company to Sidewalk Branding Company, an award-winning Rhode Island based SEO and Local Marketing firm - named a Top Startup Business in New England.

Sidewalk Branding Co. gets businesses discovered online by the people searching for what businesses have to sell using website optimization, on/off-page SEO, link building, inbound marketing, social media, search engine marketing, hyper local optimization, and content marketing.   More @ http://sidewalkbranding.co