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Imagine this: having a day to yourself, walking along the bank of a slowly flowing river. You listen to the water run across the pebbles. After a while, you find a deeper pool in the river where the riverbank is covered in grass. You bait the hook of your fishing rod, make yourself comfortable in the shade and whilst resting your back against the tree, you know that you will be back at the office tomorrow, printing the newspaper you are the editor of. The date is 1970.

Now imagine this: having a day to yourself. You would love to go down to a stream where you can lie in the sun and just be lazy, maybe fish for a while. But the closest stream that hasn’t been taken over by industrial pollution, is more than an hour away and with the price of fuel, you can’t even consider doing that. You pull your tablet closer, go onto Pinterest and with the sound of soft music in the background, you look at the different travel and nature pages, reminding yourself of a time when your feet could really feel that grass underneath. Somehow you start to relax and you know you will be okay. When you go to the office tomorrow and turn on the computer to look at the next article (did I tell you that you are the editor at a major online news agency?) you will be revived and relaxed, having fooled your body and your mind into thinking that you spent time relaxing in nature.

You get to the office the next day and while you sit down in front of your computer, you can’t help but think about the advertisement you ran across while on Pinterest the previous day. Accompanied by a beautiful article about New Years Eve in Sydney Harbor, you found information about booking trips for this special evening. Maybe something to think about?

And this is exactly it! This is the reason why not only online marketers but marketers in general, need to wake up and realize that Pinterest is not merely a social media site anymore. It has become a major marketing tool and used correctly, can help your business go from strength to strength.

Many think that Pinterest is a site where people go to when they are bored, to look at nice pictures about their interests. And here is the shocker: it is true!

We live in the information age where knowledge and information invade our space no matter where we go. Sometimes we just want to relax. But relaxing doesn’t mean sitting beside a stream, watching the water run across the pebbles anymore. For most, relaxing now means taking an iPad and relaxing, spending time online.

This is exactly where Pinterest comes in. Google and other browsers have started using images more than anything else to drive traffic to certain websites. From housewives sharing recipes to brides sharing their wedding pictures, Pinterest has become the place to share pictures. And any online marketer worth their salt should jump at the chance of using this opportunity.

Because it is centered around images, it draws people more than most other online platforms. This means that Pinterest is where your prospective customers are. Not only are they the fastest growing social media platform but comscore.com report that Pinterest buyers spend more money than any of the other top five platforms. The best news of all, according to socialfresh.com, buyers referred to a site from Pinterest, buy 70% more than people visiting your site via non-social channels.

Pinterest have around 70 million users and most pins are repinned from others. So when people engage with pins promoting your business, they essentially put your business in front of others who follow them.

There has never been a better time to use social media marketing. And it seems that Pinterest is leading the pack.

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