Pin Your Ideas

I invite you to visit and follow the Pinterest page for the NYS SBDC Research Network. You've probably heard a lot about Pinterest lately and noticed that familiar little P popping up at the bottom of articles and in catalogs and so on. This visual venue lends itself very much to the sharing of ideas, in our case, ideas about business. Most people who go on may not be impressed initially because having a good experience on Pinterest requires a bit of cultivation. Browsing the "popular" page will only show you things you've likely already seen and are the common denominator, and not tailored to you. However if you search for specific topics of interest to you, then you can begin choosing carefully the people and boards you wish to follow.

Using Pinterest to promote business is becoming more and more common although not everyone "gets" it. Authenticity is important in this medium and overt selling is out. But you can present the culture of a business or organization which is a large part of branding. For instance, a personal organizing business might set up a business page (not a personal one) and pin their client highlights or model jobs. In the blurb they could briefly describe what the goal was and include hash-tag keywords to allow search engines to find it. Pictures of people in the office is not particularly interesting to the average Pinner. But articles on the value of organizing services, how a lack of organization causes stress, possibly a board for every room of the house with tips for keeping things straight, can all go to populating a business page. Artists will often have a great number of boards on the arts as well as one or two on their own art work with links to their website. A plumber might have model bathrooms, successful projects and tile and wallpaper samples as well how to maintain equipment or humor (clean) such as you know you're in hot water when...

Browsing Pinterest can move fast so images should read well on a small format. They should also be large enough so that when a Pin is opened, the photo is well presented. Of course, repinning other people's work or images should give credit and should not be pinned from a Google image search but from an actual webpage so that whoever clicks on it can reach the originating webpage.

Pinterest is the domain of collectors. If you are into vintage American cars, you'll find a lot of others who are too. Japanese swords? Found it. Vintage locks? Ditto.You can tap into an audience that is very specific. Be choosy when deciding who to follow and people will be choosy in deciding to follow you, but when you tap into the right vein you can really find your people.

Our research network contains boards that cover a number of issues that face our clients.
Some of the topics are:
Marketing, Making Presentations, Social Media, New York State (beauty), Selling Online, Foodie Business, Sports & Fitness Business and Business of Art. There are a number of others as well.

Within these boards, you'll find articles on:

Art: How to find collectors and art business webinars
Fitness: Best fitness business networking groups
Foodie: How does an artisan baker market their business?
Entrepreneurial Lifestyle: Ethics Coach on Misrepresentation
Social Media: How to use Twitter to repair a reputation.

Have a look at the RN page and try searching for something that interests you. You may be surprised. And please share this page with any clients wishing to do a little browsing or reading.