So far, their activities on Pinterest have technically been in violation of the service’s rules, which forbade commercial usage. But now, as part of the launch, Pinterest is reversing its former ban on businesses and instead offering them separate tools and terms once they convert their existing accounts customized for businesses to fuel the expansion of its user base ahead of a decision on how to generate income from the website.
The accounts will make it easier for companies to join and use the social networking site, according to Pinterest product manager Cat Lee announced the move on the company blog, explaining:
“If your firm is entering the Pinterest community for the first time, then sign up on Pinterest for a business account. Existing accounts on Pinterest can be easily converted by following the steps on the business site.”
Follow these simple steps for signing up on our business site that allows you to specify your business name (instead of first name and last name) and go through an optimized new user flow… and verify their websites using a hidden line of code.
Moreover, once the code validation is done, businesses will receive a verification badge on their Pinterest profile pages. It is not quite as good as Twitters’ profile verification – it would still be easy for someone to impersonate a company on Pinterest by verifying a URL that was similar but not owned by the brand – but it is a start.
In addition, Pinterest has also commissioned a dedicated site for businesses, which contains best practices, case studies and documentation. The goal of providing this content: “help businesses interact with people the right way,” the company blog post read.
More so, Pinterest obviously has an interest in establishing a more formal relationship with brands. It is one the most popular social networks in the United States, where members collect and share photos by pinning them to an online bulletin board, may add more business services in the future, including analytics, she said. Whole Foods Market posts recipes on Pinterest, while Macy’s features new clothes.
Pinterest is escalating efforts to woo more businesses that add content to the service and help it boost its user base. Companies that already have a personal account on Pinterest will be able to convert it to a business account.
Image Courtesy: (Pinterest.com)
“This is the latest initiative to helping businesses make the most out of Pinterest,” Lee said in an interview. “We hope to basically give businesses more tools and more resources.”
However, prior to this fresh initiative, Pinterest’s terms of service included a license to use the service “for your personal, noncommercial use.” Nevertheless, thousands of businesses have flocked to Pinterest since its 2009 inception to create accounts and drive brand awareness in hopes of boosting ecommerce sales.
During the sign-up process, companies will also be encouraged to add Pin It and Follow buttons to their sites, Pinterest’s new page for businesses details how they can embed widgets displaying their pins and boards on their third-party sites in addition to incorporating buttons for users to pin items or follow their Pinterest pages. Widgets is an entirely new feature, and will be available both to individuals and to companies.
After allrecipes.com redesigned its website to emphasize Pinterest, it saw its traffic jump from the social networking site. (Pinterest.com)
Apart from delivering new tools, Pinterest is also launching a new business page, admitting the impact businesses have made on its site so far and detailed a handful of case studies from businesses including Jetsetter, Allrecipes.com and Etsy that have used Pinterest to drive traffic to their sites, as well as best practices and guidelines for brands, says product manager Lee.
Interestingly, after allrecipes.com revamped its website with more emphasis on Pin It buttons, more than 50,000 recipes were pinned in three months, resulting in 139 million Pinterest impressions and a more than 900-percent rise in clicks on the Pinterest content.
While the company has grown, it has not yet formulated a plan to make money from its growing base of members. “When we do introduce a business model, we will definitely plan on designing it to make the user experience better,” she said.