Pinterest: Inspiration for jewellery businesses

Posted March 12, 2013 |

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, don’t worry. The virtual pinboard is new and has become a runaway success, rapidly gaining a large, dedicated and predominantly-female online community. As a virtual pinboard, Pinterest is a sensational fit for the jewellery industry and its obsession with aesthetics and style.

Get pinned
At a basic level, Pinterest works much like Facebook or Twitter. Websites can add a ‘pin it’ button to their content alongside the ‘like’ and ‘tweet’ buttons. It’s just another way in which people can share websites or product pages, but Pinterest utilises picture-only presentations that better suit the jewellery industry.

In fact, because Pinterest allows businesses to show product to an entire audience of potential customers who already value aesthetics in fashion and jewellery, it starts to sound like an application in which jewellers should not only want to be involved but must be involved.

Keeping tabs on trends
Like Twitter and Google+, Pinterest places a lot of importance on what is happening right at the moment. Users can review other users’ pins by category, and choose their own search terms.

Searching ‘bracelet’ or ‘necklace’ will fill the screen with the newest and most popular pins that contain those search terms, often highlighting new styles and trends.

Best of all, Pinterest lets users take in a lot of visual information at a single glance, leaving the decision of whether to research further on any trends entirely up to them.

Become a leader and 'pinspire' others
Those who build brilliant pinboards with a combination of their own content and great images and ideas from all over the internet may be able to increase follower numbers and become respected ‘curators’. The key here is to keep pins relevant to a particular niche within the jewellery industry, with the occasional off-topic post to show a bit of personality.

Jewellers and suppliers must know their position, and what they can offer the market that customers are not getting somewhere else. A jewellery designer or retailer that specialises in stainless steel, for example, could try to become the go-to page for exploring the latest trends in stainless steel jewellery.

Those who can become arbiters of good taste are likely to get a lot more traction when going in for the sell, rather than by incessantly promoting only themselves.

Sell products
Already there are impressive business stories that have come out of Pinterest’s rise, including photographers and jewellery designers who have experienced massive sales increases on products that have been shared through ‘re-pins’. Pinterest can bring the user a step closer to purchase than most other social media platforms by actually displaying a price tag and linking through to an online sales point.

Throwing in a price can also be a great way to get a target audience to consider viewing images as attainable products.”It doesn’t hurt to slap a price tag on the image being shared for the sake of promotion,” Renee Warren writes for SocialFresh.com. ”Creating a call to action is a great way to get people clicking and buying.”

Social media mix: Keep it 'pinteresting'
Great digital branding is consistent across all media, but still feels distinct and exclusive to the given platform. A business considering Pinterest probably has a website and is already on Facebook, and maybe even use Twitter. In this case, make sure the Pinterest masthead and layout remain consistent with the branding on other websites and social media sites.

Better still, merge a Pinterest account into a Facebook page so fans don’t miss out on any content and don’t have to travel far to find it. Pinvolve is an add-on that turns a business’ Facebook post into a pin.