Okay Pinterest You've Got Our Interest
I'll quickly admit that we were more than a little hesitant about the whole Pinterest thing when it first came out. Just another shiny new thing and with the risk of copyright infringement? That's not an area that we want to play in. And frankly, our social media time is fairly well booked with Active Rain, Facebook and a dash of Twitter. Adding something else to the plate? Like we need MORE to do??
So we skipped Pinterest. But recently we had one of those light bulb moments. We all know that people like pictures. Need them for a blog post, got to have the relevant eye candy whenever possible. Same thing happens on Facebook....post something serious and MAYBE a couple of your hundreds of friends will make a comment, but post a photo of a pet or a flower and suddenly you've got 50% participation!
Combine that with the growth numbers of Pinterest and maybe this social media slugger SHOULD have a place in our real estate tool chest.
We've been producing community posts and would like to get some extra mileage out of them, so why not Pin them on Pinterest?
So we created a profile and started creating some boards. Pretty easy to do. Mason Communities, Lebanon Communities, Hamilton Township Communities, Patio Homes, Market Reports. All the pinned content is straight to photos from our blogs. Warren County Things To Do...back to our blogs. Create a Board to link to the various Warren County governments (except for one....can you believe they had NO photos on their website?). Create another Board to link to the area school districts. Now we've got a one stop shop for our own reference too. Any school, any local government, two clicks away without needing a Google Search or working through numerous web browser bookmarks.
And the cool thing is local consumers are already noticing. We've had a few repins already. We've been working on our Facebook business page for some time and have a few local followers, but mostly the Likes are from other Active Rainers. Pinterest is already matching a year's worth of FB work in less than two weeks. And did we mention that a local custom builder repinned a blog post we did on one of their communities?
So we're definitely seeing some potential with Pinterest. We've got a lot of past blog posts that we can still pin to our boards, ideas yet to explore. But now part of our normal routine after posting a new hyperlocal blog is to Pin It to the appropriate board. In time we expect to see more traffic to our linked sites thanks to these pins. Will someone give us that Holy Grail "Talk to me about listing my home" or "I want to buy a house, help me" calls. TBD of course, but we like what we see so far. We ARE seeing some referrals from Pinterest to our blogs via the Google Analytics stats.
If you're curious about what we're doing, we're BLiz (Bill & Liz) Spear on Pinterest. And if you have ideas on how to make it work better, we're always looking to improve!
To Pin Or Not To Pin, That WAS the question!
Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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