Businesses and brands… start your pinning!
As announced on Wednesday, Pinterest formally announced with the launch of Pinterest for Businessthat businesses are now free to create commercial accounts on the social networking site with a new terms of service announced for companies and conversion features available for members with existing accounts – acknowledged cheekily by the site in the new terms stating, “If your boss is making you use Pinterest, you need to set up a business account.”
The advantages to being able to establish a presence for your business on Pinterest keep rolling in. As pointed out by Bloomberg, the first major advantage is the ease in creating an account. You’re now able to register under the name of your business and not as your first and last name. The more businesses join, the more content is created, repinned and circulated, and the larger the user base grows as a result. Liz Gannes writes in AllThingsD that for the additional content created, benefits for businesses will include verification badges, buttons, and widgets that you can use to try to drive more people to follow and repin material from your Pinterest page.
But as with all new developments for any social media based site, questions are already arising on what comes next. As Cat Lee, a product manager with Pinterest stated, “This is the first step to helping businesses make the most out of Pinterest. We hope to basically give businesses more tools and more resources.”
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Future tools and resources to potentially look forward to include the possibility of analytics for the site, a monetary plan for members (particularly since commercial brands will now be involved), and a business model, though the latter two of this sentence have yet to be fully commented on and discussed in further detail.
In the meantime, while a business is working to create a Pinterest presence another great idea is to utilize the use of the recently launched secret boards. CEO Ben Silbermann sent out a mass email on November 10th to Pinterest users nationwide announcing that users could create up to three secret boards . Anything posted to a secret board can be repinned to other public boards – the repin just won’t link back to the secret board.
As I wrote up in a post for Social Media Today, secret boards can be quite useful for a business when it comes to communicating with the rest of the office. If you’re launching a new seasonal product with a meeting held and not all of your employees can make it to said meeting, putting the product and its details on a secret board and allowing employees to check it out from the board keeps the entire office prepped and in the know for the launch. You can also create a secret board to share in-house company designs and photos with and allow for inter-office collaboration at better ease than sending out email after email.