Find People

If you selected some areas of interest when you set up your account, your homepage will already contain some pins. If you like these users, do nothing, but if they don’t fit you, just unfollow their pins by going to their page and hitting the big unfollow button beneath their profile picture. You can also choose to follow only certain boards by a user.

Make Connections

Now is the time to start thinking like a social media marketer! Pinterest is a great forum for creatives like interior designers, photographers, fashion designers and retailers…the list goes on. Start finding accounts that are similar to you, and accounts that could be potential sales leads. What does a potential sales lead look like on Pinterest? Well, that depends. If you’re a clothing designer, you want to be looking for people like fashion bloggers and editors, buyers for stores and other people talking about fashion and design. If you’re a wedding photographer, start following wedding magazines and the many, many Pinterest accounts that are devoted to wedding planning.  (You get the idea). If you understand Twitter, you can understand Pinterest–in fact, Pinterest is a lot like a visual version of Twitter. You want to be pinning your work and things that inspire your work, and you want as many people as possible to see, like and re-pin your posts–especially your original ones. Curate the pinboards you follow, and use the comment and re-pin function to engage.

We love that Pinterest is intensely visual, making it a perfect place for creative people like designers and photographers to share their work. It also makes it incredibly easy for people to share your posts to their followers, which means it’s easy for something to go viral. Pinterest doesn’t have the widespread base that Twitter or Facebook gives you, but depending on the kind of business you have it might actually be easier to target your audience through Pinterest. For example, if you’re a florist who does a lot of weddings, you’ll find that Pinterest offers you a huge community of potential sales leads that’s already curated for you. To see some local businesses doing cool things with Pinterest, check out Gus & Ruby Letterpress, Concetta’s Closet and Pixels and Pulp.

And it’s not just great local businesses taking advantage of Pinterest. Check out these seven brands who are burning up Pinterest with their marketing awesomeness (post via @hubspot).

In addition to that, people who pin tend to pin a lot. If you come up with something that people on Pinterest like, you’ll have many passionate “pinners” sharing your work all across the site. Pinterest definitely won’t work for every company, but we think that for a certain types of businesses it has incredible potential for social media marketing.

Are you using Pinterest, either personally or for your business? Do you find that it helps you generate online leads, find interesting companies, or something else? We’re just getting started on Pinterest so we’d love to here how you’re using it and what you think! Tell us in the comments or talk to us on Facebook or Twitter.