Pinterest breaks traffic records for retailers

Pinterest, a social bookmarking site that grants you to share and pin any image on the web, is helping retailers huge time.

After joining Pinterest, you can create a Pinboard which is like a scrapbook, to collect and share your images and add descriptions to them. You can also install a bookmark button that will let you “pin” practically any image you find on-line or offline at any time to one of your boards. The site grants you to sort pins by category, including Design, Food & Drink, Apparel, and Technology.

If you stumble across a picture of an Armani Jacket while reading a blog, you can click the button to pin it to your “Apparel” board. You can also see what other people are posting and “repin” their images to your boards.

Pinterest’s users range from shopaholics to business owners. This socially curated shopping catalog is especially popular among women, who account for 58% of Pinterest’s traffic and a lot of the visitors from California and Texas according to Experian Hitwise.

The site’s popularity is quickly growing. Pinterest’s traffic increased more than fourfold between September 2011 and December 2011, bringing in 7.51 million unique visitors in December alone, data from Compete indicates.

Retailers can benefit more from the site in 4 ways:

Including a “Pin it” button on the site

Brands can add the “Pin It” button to their websites and blog, alongside other social sharing buttons to share their content with their community.

Searching for the brand’s mention

Retailers can do a quick search of their brands to see what content people have pinned from their website. This could be done by adding, “source” and the website address to the Pinterest homepage URL.

Pinterest displays the most trending content/brands making it easier for retailers to easily to identify what products seem to be most popular and accordingly use the information to their advantage.

Pinterest doesn’t grant self-promotion but retailers can encourage their community to promote their brands for them.For eg: ”Lands’ End asked fans to create pinboards with their favorite Land’s End products for the chance to win a $250 gift card in their “Pin It to Win It” contest.

According to a research conducted by Compete, Pinterest’s traffic increased more than fourfold between September 2011 and December 2011, with 7.51 million unique visitors visiting the site in December alone.

Pinterest is a perfect place for retailers to gauge how their brand is valued by users and they are beginning to recognize its potential

New Social media tools like Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapaper, Snip.it, Clipboard, enable users to directly filter, collect and clip the images on the web that they find most interesting saving the time spent in browsing the web from Google, or Facebook.

Take a look at the Infographic below created by Monetate to get a better idea