Pinterest is a social network site that allows users to ‘pin’ images to various boards which they can then revisit later on. Similar to Instagram, it’s a visual social media platform, but unlike Instagram it acts as a type of visual search engine in which users can search for a vast amount of images, GIFs and videos.
The main aim of Pinterest is to discover, save and try out new ideas. There’s plenty of inspiring ideas, funny quotes and helpful recipes to be discovered on Pinterest; but how can it help your dental practice?
The Pinterest ‘newsfeed’ is made up of ‘pins’ that you can then repin, like and share. Pins are made up of an image, a description, a title and quite often a link back to the image’s original online source. When a user clicks on a particular pin, they will be directed to the image’s original source, thus taking them to an entirely different website.
This can be a highly beneficial tool for your dental practice as you could have various specific Pinterest boards that consists of images like “braces”, “teeth whitening” and “dentists”. As Pinterest is essentially a visually search engine as it allows you to search for anything and will return results of images of the query you searched for.
The example below shows the results when you search for “teeth whitening” which includes various images of teeth, DIY hacks and infographics. A dental practice may choose to utilise Pinterest as a means of obtaining traffic to their website as people may click through to your website via the images that they see on their Pinterest feed.
Pinterest is an excellent platform for businesses to use as it allows them to highlight their own products, attract more website visitors, increase sales and build brand awareness. The visual search engine also allows ‘Pinners’ to install a browser extension by which they can save anything from the web to their Pinterest boards. You may want to implement this feature into your dental website as patients will be able to save images from your website to their Pinterest feed which they can then refer back to later on.
This also means that any images a ‘Pinner’ saves will be shown in their followers’ feed too, meaning that you can gain even more access to a wider audience.
When using Pinterest, particularly from a business perspective, it’s important to not only pin your own content but other people’s images too. This will allow your Pinterest account to be seen by more people and they will recognise the variety of your content. For many generic users, Pinterest is simply a platform to use to search for recipes, DIY inspiration and beauty tips but from a business point of view, it can be a very handy tool to help drive traffic to your website.
Yet another benefit of Pinterest is that it is free to use and there’s no hidden fees which is obviously a huge bonus. When setting up a Pinterest account for your dental practice, you may want to consider setting up a business account (again, it’s free of charge) as you’ll be able to see a plethora of interesting statistics such as monthly views, followers and your most popular pins.
Over 200 million people have an active Pinterest account, and with over 100 billion pins currently circulating on the platform, it’s clear to see that you’ll never be short of interesting content!