• by Kara Trivunovic , Op-Ed Contributor, April 13, 2012

As MediaPost, has reported, Pinterest is the third most popular social media site now, behind Google and Facebook.  Pinterest (as I am sure you are all aware) is a virtual pin board where consumers can grab images from their Web surfing activity and pin them up on categorical boards that allow them to share the information. It’s a channel that is visual in nature, currently draws a largely female audience, resonates topically with the home, fashion and food (amongst others) and is leveraged heavily for planning (think weddings, birthdays, vacation, etc). So a good thing to remember is that it isn’t the best place to be for every brand…yet.

In a recent survey of over 4,800 U.S. online consumers by the price comparison website PriceGrabber, 58% of respondents said they were not yet on Pinterest -- and about 1/3 of those didn’t even know what it was.  But these numbers are anticipated to shift -- making Pinterest a channel to watch -- especially since the same survey found that 21% of those surveyed that did have Pinterest accounts had cited purchasing a product specifically after seeing the pin.

The ability to leverage the email channel to build and grow a Pinterest presence is a relatively easy task to accomplish. Here are a few quick tricks and “good-to-knows” about bringing these two channels together -- beyond the act of adding a “follow us on Pinterest” icon in your standard social set:

Use email to announce your Pinterest presence. Your email subscribers are often your best customers. If your brand aligns with the demographic and psychographic makeup of the Pinterest user, there is no reason not to share your presence and the content available with your customers.

Include “pin this” icons on individual content within your email  Including a Pinterest icon with a simple string of code is all you need to do to get your content from your email to your Board. You even have the ability to pass through a description to accompany the image – and descriptions in Pinterest are important.

A few fun things to note here: if you include a dollar amount price in the description, Pinterest will automatically place a banner in the top, lefthand side of the image featuring the price; it will also place the Pin in its Gift Guides from the main drop down. Another fun note is that descriptions can also help impact SEO. Think the descriptions through as carefully as you choose your imagery.

Coordinate new boards or pins around email deployment
If you are including references to Pinterest within your email communication, chances are your customers may visit your Pinterest Wall of various Boards following an email deployment. It is a good idea to have new content available when they get there. To that point, you should be putting up new content, arranging boards and managing the “above the fold” appearances of your Pinterest presence frequently to deter fatigue.

As you can imagine, this is an ever-evolving topic and new information is coming out by the minute it seems -- we are just scratching the surface of what marketers can do with this channel, so look at this as a solid place to start Pinning.