Staying up-to-date with the recent developments in digital marketing and social media space has become the must for online entrepreneurs. It is quite a big challenge for small business owners to keep up with all the latest changes and updates on numerous social media platforms. Attempts to build your company’s presence equally on all popular social networks is a time consuming and overwhelming task. If you are not planning to spend all your time on growing your business profiles on social websites it is important to prioritize them and select websites that are the most effective for your business to get the best value out of your efforts. One of the social media platforms that deserves the precise interest of eCommerce businesses is Pinterest.

Pinterest is a young social bookmarking site that was launched as lately as in March 2010 and since then has become a major social network with over 70 million users and 2.5 billions page views per month. The fact that Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social platforms and the third most popular social media website behind only Facebook and Twitter already makes it very interesting for businesses. This thriving social network provides many brilliant opportunities for online entrepreneurs to leverage their brand popularity, drive sales and traffic to their websites.

One of peculiarities of Pinterest is that it is extremely friendly place for promoting online businesses and for driving revenue to eCommerce sites. Pinterest users are more active in sharing eCommerce content than users of any other social networking site, they trust information they receive through Pinterest and they tend to spend more money than Facebook and Twitter shoppers.

The Pinterest’s pinboard-style design is very conducive for sharing product images and other marketing materials. New features introduced by Pinterest are making it even more attractive to eCommerce businesses than it was before. Rich pins, rolled out in May, allow to put detailed information, including  current pricing and availability, into product pins. Including prices on pins is an effective marketing technique because pins with prices statistically get more likes and have higher click-through rates than regular pins. Price alerts for product pins, released recently, have made this option even more exciting for both merchants and shoppers. Now Pinterest users get email notification whenever price of a pinned product drops. Price alerts can help to drive more sales as this feature works like a free email marketing tool.

Generating direct sales leads is not the only one use of Pinterest for brands. It provides great opportunities for e-businesses to reach potential buyers, establish firm connections with customers, drive long-tail referral traffic, research latest market trends and many more. Of course, all this can’t be achieved without hard work on creating smart-looking business profile with interesting boards and pins, accompanying your posts with stunning images, building an engaged audience and persistent work on seeding your content on Pinterest. However, the powerful benefits provided by Pinterest for businesses are worth the effort and the opportunities for brands on Pinterest continue to grow. Pinterest has the power to grow your eCommerce business larger than you ever dared to dream!