Pinterest is a social networking site that permits its users to discuss anything and also pin information including pictures of products and also links to websites of interest.

Pinterest is a web and mobile application company that offers a visual discovery, collection, sharing, and storage tool. Users create and share collections of visual bookmarks (boards). Boards are created through a user selecting pictures of products, items, pages, websites, and pinning it to an existing or newly created board. Each of these pins, images, and boards provides links to other websites.

Find out how Pinterest and boards can work.

Users save and share pins from multiple resources onto boards based on a plethora of criteria, e.g., similar characteristics, a theme, birthday parties, planning a vacation, writing a book, interior decorating, holidays. Boards can develop projects, organize events, or save pictures and data together.

Pinterest has in a short time resulted in driving more sales than many other famous social networks and its best feature is that it gives way to both, B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) productions.

Pinterest is a wonderful platform for conducting informal market research that aid business in designing better marketing programs. You can publish images of products and can ask users to share their thoughts about them. Besides, you could also ask for users’ views on the ads and packaging concepts.

Pinterest also allows businesses to create pages aimed at promoting their companies online. Such pages can serve as a “virtual storefront” In one case study of a fashion website, users visiting from Pinterest spent $180 compared to $85 spent from users coming from Facebook. These users spent less time on the company’s website, choosing instead to browse from the company’s pinboard.

Further brand studies have continued to show Pinterest is more effective at driving sales than other forms of social media. In 2013, Pinterest introduced a new tool called ‘Rich Pins’, to enhance the customer experience when browsing through pins made by companies. Business pages can include various data, topics and information such as prices of products, ratings of movies or ingredients for recipes.

Social media, if used correctly is an invaluable source of business, but it can be a time waster if you don’t know how to avoid the issues that suck the time right out of your day. At first, you’ll feel strange and unnatural learning to avoid time suckers, but it will also be an empowering experience that will help you grow your business using social media well.  After all, you must use social media, this is where your clients are, so you gotta be there!