The Pinterest team sure knows how to ride the wave. One of the newest and most popular social networking sites, its latest offering lets small businesses and companies set up official accounts on the platform which function differently from the standard personal user accounts. What started off as a helpful tool for designers, wedding planners, and users who loved to collect and share images from across the internet soon saw a huge potential as a powerful marketing tool for businesses.
The new change lets businesses officially link their websites to their Pinterest accounts and list themselves on these accounts. Businesses also have the option to add the “Pin It” buttons on their websites’ content and follow their Pinterest feeds. This move by Pinterest is seen by many as a way for the social network to start generating revenue from its business model.
The business account feature of Pinterest is something similar to Facebook’s option for setting up company pages that could be “liked” by their fans and customers. Currently, Pinterest is a privately-held company and there are no disclosures from the company on the amount of revenue it generates, and how it manages to make profits. In just 1 year since October 2011, the number of unique visitors on Pinterest grew from 3.3 million all the way up to 26.7 million.
