Businesses Flood Pinterest With Special Deals, Coupons « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

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Found this excellent article about pinterest on the local CBS affiliate's website. It gives great ideas and information on the new social networking platform that any small business could use. Includes tips and tricks as well as content recommendations that you can use to leverage your small business' presence online and off. If you want to see the original article click here

FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) – From recipes to do-it-yourself crafts, if you’re interested in it, it’s on Pinterest. And savvy businesses know that everyone is interested in saving money.

Pinterest is a sort of virtual bulletin board, where users ‘pin’ up a picture of something and receive instant feedback. Businesses and marketers are clued into this.

Let’s say you’re fascinated by fashion, for instance. There’s an entire pinboard dedicated to coupons for clothes.

“It’s focused on content that is image related,” said social mediaexpert Tiffany Monhollon. “This is a great way to get it in front of people who might be completely ravenous for it.”

Monhollon and her team at Plano-based ReachLocal are helping small businesses use Pinterest to attract new customers.

“If they can create and pin content and then get other people to re-share it on the site, they can drive incredible amounts of traffic to their site for maybe a local or small business that otherwise would have a hard time getting in front of as many eyeballs,” she said.

We did a quick search and found a number of North Texas companies who are now pushing to pin — like American Airlines, which hosts both a main company page and a separate page for Europeans traveling to the United States.

“Any business that is creating how-to or tutorialcontent, that’s a really hot topic on Pinterest,” Monhollon said.

That’s what Fort Worth-based RadioShack is doing with its Pinterest page. There, you’ll find anything from ways to glam up your gadgets to tech-based fashion ideas.

“On Pinterest, what we noticed, it’s more of a visual guide to what people are looking for,” said Cosmin Ghiurau who runs the social media campaigns for RadioShack. ”Our motive was really being in a space where people can discover and really be able to discover new ideas and things they can do.”

Alyssa Gardina with PR firm WeberShandwick says as Pinterest continues to grow, more companies will begin incorporating deals.

“I think Pinterest gives you a really great opportunity to engage with customers one on one,” Gardina said. “What’s most important is to provide value. That could be in the form of a coupon, or offer. It could be a sweepstakes.”

So your opportunities to save will continue to grow, too, as businesses pin to get you to pay attention.

“I think Pinterest is interesting for business because it’s kind of seen as cutting edge, so a lot of business want to hop on it as we try to figure out this landscape and it’s a new thing to kind of harness,” said Monhollon.

Pinterest is fairly new, but social media experts say the site’s popularity can only mean good things for consumers. That’s exactly what happened on Facebook and Twitter, where exclusive deals and discounts are plentiful.