This is a guest post by Cindy Jacobs who is an enthusiastic "pinner," online instructor and coordinator for College City. As an avid pinner, Cindy has come to understand how blogs and businesses have begun to use Pinterest for marketing and promotional purposes.

Pinterest is the hottest addition to the social networking scene and an incredible tool that blogs and businesses should tap into for marketing and promotional purposes. Pinterest is a content sharing service that allows users to create, share and disseminate unique "pins" that can be image, video or text-based. Users can create their own virtual pinboards and easily share the beautiful and fascinating things they find on the web. Some of the most popular content themes on Pinterest include hobbies, fashion, beauty, food, home decor and inspirational items.


Why should a blog or business add Pinterest to its social networking arsenal? There are several reasons.



Pinterest is Expanding at an Historic Pace

Pinterest has become the fastest growing website ever, according to Fortune magazine. The social networking site added an astounding 17 million users in March 2012, which marked a 52 percent increase over its growth in February. Pinterest's potential to expand is currently unparalleled.

Pinterest Thwarts Other Networking Sites in Key Areas

You may be surprised to learn that Pinterest actually drove more people to visit retail sites than Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. The visual nature of Pinterest is responsible for quickly capturing the attention of users and driving them to retail sites. You may find users on Pinterest who do not visit or use other networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. Adding Pinterest to your social networking aresenal allows you to reach a new audience and creates a visual dimension to your marketing strategies.

Now that we have explored some of the benefits of using Pinterest for marketing and promotional purposes, it is important to highlight how exactly you can tap into the social networking site's explosive potential.

Play Around First

The first step toward utilizing Pinterest in your marketing and promotional pursuits is to simply register to the networking site and play around with it on your own. You can start by creating your own virtual pinboards and following other users who share similar interests. You will quickly understand how Pinterest works. This is an important first step in using the networking tool to market your blog or business.

Create Visually Appealing Pins With Women in Mind

The most important characteristic of Pinterest that you must be made aware of is that 80 percent of its users are female. Is there any component of your blog or business that would really appeal to women? Is your blog all about exotic recipes from around the world? Does your business provide home decor services? If so, you can really create visually stunning pins that would attract women. It may be worthwhile to hire a professional graphic designer to create pins for you. Also, remember that you can also create text and video-based pins to promote your products or services. You could transform a positive customer testimonial into a pin. You could create a how-to video about some of your products and add it to your pinboard.

Add "Pin It" Button to Your Site

As your site begins to really develop a strong presence on Pinterest, you can add a "Pin It" button to your website so that users who visit your blog or business site can easily pin different items to their own pinboards. You can imagine how this button would begin to work for itself immediately. This will significantly expand the number of "re-pins" that your items will have. Re-pins are very similar to backlinking in that your brand will be disseminated to a variety of sources.

Closely Track Analytics

If you are using Google Analytics or other traffic tracking tool, you should monitor what exactly led users to land on your site via Pinterest. Whatever seems to be working for you, do more of it.

This really is the perfect time to add Pinterest to your social networking arsenal. The visual nature of Pinterest makes it a phenomenal tool for marketing and promotional purposes.

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