Introduction to Pinterest
Pinterest is a visual application for finding ideas and inspiration for recipes, home, style and more. This makes it a great platform for marketing. People use it to find inspiration and new things to try. That also makes it an excellent platform for travel companies to market their business.
In a nutshell:
- User will open the app in search of inspiration for literally anything you could imagine people needing inspiration or new ideas for. That might be anything from cooking to fashion, baby products or travel.
- Everyone has their own “front page” to scroll with content tailored just for them, but usually people also use the search engine with different key words to find the content that they want to see.
- After finding what they were looking for, they can save the Pins to differend Pinterest Boards so that all their ideas will stay organized in their own boards.
- If the user finds a product or service that they love, they can save it for later to use or purchase or they can do it right away by following a link from the Pin.
And of course the users and also create their own Pins to share their ideas with other people.
Pinterest is mostly used to find ideas and inspiration. That means people also use it to seek for different destinations, attractions and hotels. When thinking about the tourism industry, Pinterest is a great platform to market your company and travelling destinations.
How to start using Pinterest?
The business account and regular accounts in Pinterest are similar but with business account you can get access to few tools that are helpful when trying to market a product or service. Creating a business account to Pinterest is free, quick and easy. It takes only a few minutes and you can start posting right away! And for making the account, you do not really need anything else other than an email address. It’s also possible to convert your personal account to a business one. Easy enough if you ask me!
If you’re not a business owner and want to create a personal account, you have to meet the minimum age requirements to sign up. After signing up, you can choose topics of what you are interested in, and the application will give you pins (pictures & videos) of those topics. If you want to search for something, for example, travel destination or recipes, you can just write a few keywords to search box. After that algorithm will give pins that match your search.
How to use Pinterest in a tourism business?
Pinterest is a platform where you can add videos and pictures. In Pinterest Newsroom in ”The Pinterest 2024 Travel report” It is said that “ 8 out of 10 weekly Pinterest users turn to Pinterest when planning their summer escapades.” So with Pinterest having over 522 million monthly active users it makes it an important platform for tourism companies to reach possible clients.
As a tourism company you could reach a new audience by taking Pinterest as part of your marketing plan. You can market your products and/or services by adding pins that are visually appealing and attract the users attention. A successful Pin is visually pleasing, good quality, shows your product, has the company name in it and has a link to the website where people can get to know more about the product or even purchase it.
When creating a Pin, Pinterest has the create a Pin tool. The picture above is a screenshot from Pinterest “create a Pin tool” and it shows how creating a Pin happens. First you have to choose if you want to post picture or video. After that you can name the Pin and write the description. This part is really crucial when thinking about how well your Pin will do and that way find its audience. After naming the Pin and writing the description, you can add a link to the website and some keywords, so people can find your content easier.
Who is using Pinterest?
- Mostly women, but there’s also a lot of men who use Pinterest.
- The fastest growing group using Pinterest is Gen Z. (42% of users)
- Gen Z uses Pinterest actively, they search for products, inspiration etc. They are using Pinterest to find products and brand that they can spend their money on. Even tho Gen Z is the biggest user group, Pinterest is popular with all age groups.
- People who like visual content
- In the USA Pinterest is popular with higher income households. Pinterest says it reaches “40% of US households with an annual income over $150K.” (Pinterest Business 2024)
- People who want to find new ideas and inspiration
What type of content, when & how often?
When posting content to Pinterest it is really important to think about visuality. Pinterest is all about nice pictures and videos and if you can’t make your content visually appealing, it’s really hard to reach the target audience. To make your content interesting to users you have to pay attention to many little things when creating a post. Important things such as the quality of the pictures (and videos), the story behind it and the style and even the colour, lighting and framing of the pictures are crucial to do right.
In Pinterest people usually search for content by keywords that they type to the search. It makes it really important to name your posts correctly to reach as many people as possible.
Long term marketing is key in Pinterest. Pinterest algorithm doensn’t show newest posts first so it is really important to be consistent and to make sure that the quality of your Pins is top noch. The more people save, click or react to your Pin’s the more the algorithm pushes it to other users. Pinterest recommends that you should publish new content weekly to get your content to reach people. (Pinterest business 2024)
Communication with your followers
In Pinterest there is a possibility to comment on other people’s Pins. Also, it is possible to send a message to each other. In settings you are able to choose whether you are accepting comments in your Pins, or who can send you a message. If you have a business account, comments and chat messages could be a good way to engage with possible clients about your product or get feedback about your content. But as it was said in the YouTube video above people like to think Pinterest as a library, where you can just enjoy the nice content and maybe not even interact with others.
What kind of data does Pinterest offer to businesses?
In Pinterest business accounts can get access to audience insights, different metrics and the possibility of promoting your Pins.
Examples of the best tourism accounts
The best travel accounts in Pinterest have a few things in common. All of them have a Pinterest board full on gorgeous pictures about beautiful destinations and All of them have some kind on inspo for people using Pinterest. For example they tell you the 5 best hotels to stay in or the best airline to travel with. Scrolling thru these amazing accounts is such a joy and it makes people want to go and explore the same destinations in real life too.
In the bottom picture you can see many Pins about travel to Finland. As you can see, many of them have a big title about “how to… the best things…”. These Pins are made by travel websites, none of them are not from Finland or Lapland. After using Pinterest for many years and noticed that there are not that many Finnish companies using Pinterest for their marketing. If you ask me, that’s a lost opportunity for many Finnish companies.
Our impressions
We both like to use Pinterest more or less in our everyday lifes. We think it’s a great platform to seek inspiration for new ideas, recipes, home, travel etc. Also it’s such a joy just scrolling thru visually pleasing content. It’s just a great app to get all your ideas and thoughts organized in their own folders and then you can go and watch them anytime you like.
While working on this blogpost we also noticed that Pinterest really is a great platform for companies to market their products. Nowadays people use it more and more to find things that they love and want to purchase. Also the fact that at least in the USA, people who might have some extra money to spend, tend to use the app a lot. It’s all about nice pictures and visually pleasing content, travel content is usually visually beautiful – that makes it a perfect match.
Of course “making it” in Pinterest might be harder than in other socials (like instagram) just because there’s so much less people using it on a daily basis, but the audience using it is actually using the search engine to find the content that you provide.
We think that there’s still a lot more opportunities for companies in Pinterest.
Sources used:
Pinterest travel report, Pinterest business, Pinterest Business (ads), Pinterest business (get started),
Hello Sara and Aliisa.
I am not at all familiar with Pinterest. It seems to be easy and useful. I think I need it in my private life too, haha. It seems to be a good tool for toursim companies.
The text didn’t feel too long, thanks to the pictures in the middle of the texts, I like it. It was also well written and according to the checklist.
Best regards,
Teija
Hi Teija!
Thank you for your comment! Nice to hear that our post is making you to consider using Pinterest in your private life!
Hello Sara and Aliisa!
I have used Pinterest but that was years ago and only briefly. I was surprised to see it on this course as one of the topics because I had no idea they have these business features – I thought it’s only for photo inspiration.
I think Pinterest might not be for everyone because it requires certain type of pictures. Visuality is important in almost all social medias, but in many other platforms there is more room for not so perfectly polished content. Everyone of course wants their business location to look nice, but I’m guessing Pinterest requires really breathtaking or otherwise extremely good-looking content. But it is certainly a good platform for tourism businesses that are aiming to be high-end services.
Your post is well-executed. The headlines are informative. Texts are well-written and the paragrapsh are not too long. Pictures make the post very nice and complete the text. I very much enjoyed reading your tutorial!
I have used Pinterest a little bit, but i have never thought about how to use it in marketing. Therefore this blogpost was very interesting to read.
I think the photos and videos were very informative and well chosen. I really liked the title. I can really see that you paid attention to the SEO analysis.
Thank you for your post!
I used Pinterest when I was young to get inspiration for different outfits. I didn’t think there was much more to it now and for professional use!
You have put together a good, big information package from the platform, however, it was not too bulky. The images supported and paused the text well.
The title of the blog in white font color slightly loses in the banner image, the only point I’d mark with a red highlight pen.
Good work!
Hello! Thank you for your post, I really liked it! I was already somewhat familiar with Pinterest but I haven’t been an active user. Your post was full of great information and the layout was visually really nice.
Hi Sara and Aliisa!
I wasn’t aware that Pinterest could be used for business marketing purposes. The app isn’t very familiar to me, and I’ve only used it occasionally to search for inspiration, like when organizing themed parties. I think Pinterest offers an interesting opportunity, but it also seems like quite a challenging platform because all the photos and pictures have to be “perfect”. 😀
Your post had some interesting statistics! The screenshots throughout the text also helped me understand the topic better. It’s a well-written tutorial. However, I would pay attention to the background image in the title, as the text is a bit hard to read.
Best regards,
Marianne