Have you heard of Pinterest yet? Tag….now you have. What is Pinterest? You could ask the nearest twenty something female, or read on. Some have called the site a female Tumblr. Pinterest is a visual bulletin board social media site. Members create any number of their own boards . The subjects of these boards are as wide and varied as the over 4 million registered users could possibly imagine, from food to funny, beaches to brides, tattoos to TV shows. Users pin photos they find interesting to their boards with very brief description or caption for each photo. Users can now sign in with their Facebook login and their pins can be shared with their Facebook friends in their timeline too.
Once you have an account (which currently is by invitation only, though not hard to get an invitation from the company either), you create a board or boards of your interest. You can always create more boards or delete old boards. You then pin images to your board(s) with your short captions. If the image is shared from a website, the link back to that site remains with the photo for all to see (can we say backlink?). You can also repin someone else photo to any of your boards and the link back to their board as well as the source link follow onto your page.
So, you might be asking, what the heck does this have to do with my eye care practice? Don’t I have enough to worry about with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Linkedin? Yes, your social media plate might seem a little full, but you might also ask yourself “Wouldn’t it be nice to be ahead of the social media curve for once?”
Imagine setting up a Pinterest for your practice/store where you take a photo of every patient/customer in their new eyeglasses and pin their photo to one of your boards? It take only seconds. Your patient/customer will want to share their photo on their board and with their Facebook friends. Remember where I earlier said the source of the photo stays with the photo? All those shares and repins all point back to your page where you can showcase your good looking customers as well as your great selection of good looking frames. If you are a manufacturer, you could have your own page where you could place your professional photos frames and sunglasses for buyers of your product to repin on their pages.
Pinteresting is already one of the 10 top social media networks…even before it is fully open to the public. It will never replace Facebook, or Twitter, or Linkedin, but is certainly a site worth looking at and worth promoting your practice/business in.
