Pinterest is quickly becoming a significant channel in today's ever-evolving social media landscape. Understanding what Pinterest is and how members and marketers are using it will allow you to make the most of it.

Consider the following: Pinterest already has 20 million unique users, and it's the fastest-growing social network in history, according to comScore; Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Twitter and more than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined, according to Shareaholic; nearly 80% of pins are repins, whereas only 1.4% of tweets are retweets, according to HubSpot; and, most important, it converts: PriceGrabber found 21% of users have purchased an item that they found on the site.

Marketing Tips

Whether you are a beginner or you know your way around the site, here are some quick tips to get you started on marketing on Pinterest.

Are you a beginner?

1. Sign up. Pinterest is driven largely by individual curators rather than brands. So it might be a good idea for your Pinterest account to be in the name of your CEO, style editor, buyer, etc.
2. Follow people. Make sure to follow not only users who are pinning your content but also competitors and brands that are using the channel well.
3. Create boards. Boards can be categorized by product type, season, color, pinner—whatever makes sense to your business.
4. Pin content. Pin from your website to your boards. Use the bookmarklet or directly upload new images that are not coming directly from your website (more here). I'm not a lawyer but here's a quick legal side note: Play it safe and pin only your own content.

Are you an intermediate user?

Add Pinterest follow icons to your website and emails so that users can follow your Pinterest boards. Group them with other social-media follow icons.

Are you an advanced user? Take your campaigns one step further:

1. Add sharing functionality to your website that allows users to pin content from it onto Pinterest.
2. Add sharing functionality to your emails to encourage subscribers to pin content directly from those emails.
3. Run dedicated email campaigns highlighting Pinterest contests and "reveals."

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