This article was originally published in Dutch in 2012 and has been translated and updated in October 2026.
Pinterest grew enormously in the years after its launch. By October 2012, the number of visitors to the online pinboard had risen to 34.5 million a month worldwide, and the average visitor spent 89 minutes on the visual network. In B2C, Pinterest was already being used to create experiences and engagement around brands. A question many B2B organisations asked at the time: are we missing the boat if we don’t join Pinterest?
Marketers’ reluctance
A survey from 2012 showed that not every marketer was eager to embrace Pinterest: 44% of respondents said they were not interested in pinning and creating boards for their company. 18% even said they had never heard of Pinterest. If you are not immediately convinced by Pinterest and you see your competitors doing nothing either, you might not take action straight away. But is that the right choice? Look at the reasons why Pinterest can be interesting for your B2B organisation too.
People - and that includes business contacts - are quicker to build relationships with people and organisations they trust and/or identify with. On Pinterest, users collect photos, images and illustrations that inspire them and suit their lifestyle. In doing so, they show who they are. Their identity comes to the fore. The same applies to organisations. Pinterest is a way to extend your ‘storytelling’. With fascinating images, you tell the story of your company and your products, services and people. You show your identity and become a human brand that people want to connect with.
A picture is worth a thousand words… even for ‘text-focused organisations’
Research shows that a photo is the shortest summary that gives people an impression of what an article is about. Amid the flood of information they receive, it lets them scan whether they want to read the underlying information or article. In their private networks on social media, people most enjoy seeing and responding to their friends’ photos. With brands and organisations, it is no different. 44% of respondents said they are more likely to connect and engage with brands that share photos. However, the photos that companies share should preferably not be product shots, but images that evoke emotion and feeling. Rather than showing a large flatscreen TV, show a family in a cosy living room watching that same flatscreen TV together.
Infographics are a popular way of processing information on Pinterest. Quotes added to photos, or quotes set in beautiful lettering, are other ways to make text attractive and tempt people to click through.
Organising information
Because you can create boards on Pinterest around different themes and topics, it is very well suited to organising information and images. That is why it was increasingly being used as a kind of bookmarking site. Users can mark and save interesting articles this way. If you search for the topic ‘social media’, for example, dozens of boards and pins come up.
Search and SEO
It follows logically from organising information that people will also search more often for themes relevant to your business. If users pin infographics or models from your organisation, you can appear in the search results. A presence on Pinterest can also have a positive effect on your rankings in search engines.
Another angle on Pinterest’s search function is that a (potential) business contact, in the orientation phase of their ‘customer decision journey’, searches the internet for information to get to know your organisation better. By pinning images on Pinterest that radiate your organisation’s feeling and motivations, the prospect can literally form a good picture of you.
Referral traffic
In 2012, Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic. For Twitter the figure was 3.61%, for LinkedIn 0.20% and for YouTube 1.05%. Google products such as Gmail accounted for 3.62% of referrals. That made Pinterest interesting as a driver of traffic to your website. Only Facebook towered above everything else, with 26.4% of referral traffic.
80% are repins
In the context of referral traffic, this is an interesting fact: apparently most Pinterest users are inspired by photos and images pinned by other users. At the time, 80% of pins were ‘repins’!
If your organisation is present on Pinterest and/or you offer Pinterest share buttons on your site, ambassadors and fans can pin your photos and articles, making them visible to other Pinterest users. This gives you more reach, with a chance of ‘repins’.
Men and women in balance
Until then, studies had shown that the majority of users were women: 80%. However, there were signs that this was becoming more balanced: in February 2012, 56% of Pinterest users in the UK were men. The average age of users was between 35 and 44. In the UK, the average age was ten years younger, between 25 and 34. This shift towards men no doubt went hand in hand with the other findings: Pinterest as a search engine and as a bookmarking site, focused on finding and saving relevant (business, substantive) content.
A point to watch is the quality of users: high, but declining
Pinterest users showed high scores for activity, engagement, retention and virality. In the first months, with relatively few users, the average number of pins was 500 per user. A few months later, the average was around 120 pins. Pinterest users are active: 40% to 60% came back to pin during the first eight weeks of their membership. These figures were measured when the network was still invitation-only. Now that the network was open to everyone, there was a chance of lower average usage and activity. This was something to keep an eye on (for Pinterest’s own developers too).
How does your organisation tell its story?
When this article was first written, Pinterest had no ‘company pages’: you were one among many. Today, Pinterest does offer free business accounts, which give you access to analytics on your Pins and the ability to run ads. Whichever account you use, you can tell your story by:
- Putting together attractive boards with relevant titles (the terms you want to be found for).
- Presenting information in handy infographics. These are pinned and repinned frequently on Pinterest.
- Photos with quotes.
- Images of beautifully designed quotes. Use attractive lettering and colours.
- Videos.
- Slideshows.
- E-books.
- White papers.
- Photo galleries of satisfied customers, with their short story.
- Photo galleries of your team.
- Photos of the voluntary work you do.
- Photos or videos of the charities you support or, for example, the cultural projects you sponsor.
- Co-creation with your target audience to develop or improve a new product or service using mood boards. With mood boards, you harness the power of association. Co-creation could also mean, for example, that employees help decide on the new office layout in a shared mood board. Why would you do that in public on Pinterest? Because it shows something of who you are as an organisation, how employees are involved and how they even have fun working towards something together.
When setting up your boards and pins, also take into account how users view the pages, as shown in the findings of this eye-tracking study.
Is your organisation already passively present on Pinterest?
Even if you don’t have an account (yet), you may already be present on Pinterest because people have pinned your content. As part of ‘listening’, you could check this at the time via http://pinterest.com/source/your-own-website.com/, where ‘your-own-website.com’ is the URL of your own organisation’s website.
Start with a goal
Based on the facts above, Pinterest seemed to be becoming a more attractive part of your marketing communications mix. You can ‘take part’ passively by making it possible to pin articles and photos from your website, and actively by creating boards and, as an organisation, pinning and repinning articles that interest your target audience.
It goes without saying that - just as with any other communication tool - you need to set a clear goal for what you want to achieve with your ‘social presence’ on Pinterest. When is taking part a success for your organisation? Which metrics can you use to steer? Otherwise you will never be able to say whether Pinterest is contributing to your brand awareness, traffic or lead generation.