There were many virtual eye rolls when I offered to write about this subject, but numbers don’t lie: Pinterest is one of the most engaging social platforms out there these days.
According to Pew Research from 2012, 15% of internet users use Pinterest, and most are college educated. It’s also home to all those #girlygeeks: women are five times as likely to be on Pinterest than men. And although the number may seem small, their sharing power is huge: in an article last October, Mashable reported that “Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Publishers Than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit Combined”.
Part of the addiction to Pinterest includes its low barriers of entry to add content. Where social bookmarking fell short, Pinterest allows you to grab an image from a webpage and pin it to one of your boards, which will be a visual representation of that link to visit later. This is most easily done by adding the bookmarklet onto your browser. Watch the video below to find out how.
http://youtu.be/gRwy0mOAJ7U
It hasn’t exploded yet like the #askforce twitter channel, but it is gaining traction. Here are the top 4.5 ways Pinterest and Salesforce go together, like peanut butter and jelly.
1.) Infographics!
Need an infographic? Pinterest is the place. Searching for “Salesforce” will bring up a lot of these – which can be very handy if you’re looking for something in particular. The caveat of searching through Pinterest is due to the automatic resizing , most of the text within the images will be sized down too far to be readable, but I don’t mind, as it makes me look at the graphic more to see what I am visually attracted to first. If I like the image even before I read it, chances are someone else will (follow this board).
2.) Your Favorite AppExchange Apps
This is where the group pin boards come in real handy: Create a board of your favorite AppExchange Apps, then invite your other friends on Pinterest to the board by clicking Edit Board and then adding your friends by name or email. This way, you can share a page of your favorite AppExchange Apps with each other easily! This blows the Saved List out of the water (follow this board).
3.) Exam Preparation
Pinterest User Cloudspokes beat us to it (http://www.pinterest.com/cloudspokes/developer-books/), but they use Pinterest as a resource guide. This is a great way to pin resources that may help for your next exam preparation, finding recommended developer books, pages with great study guides, and Salesforce humor when you need a break.
4.) Tell the World about your Great Clients
Most recently, Pinterest opened up business accounts, and gradually companies are jumping on board to have meaningful interactions with their stakeholders in their social lives. We use this to show off our great clients by utilizing the description tag on each pin. Often underutilized, the description is a huge alt-tag that gives you 500 characters to describe your pin. The best part, though, is that all searching through Pinterest goes through the description, not through anything related to the image. If someone is searching for Nashville, they’re likely to find our client, HandsOn Nashville (follow this board).
4.5.) Follow your favorite Salesforce Personalities
Dan Darcy is really into backyard design lately. Who knew? Pinterest did.
