Elad Gil, who works for Twitter as a result of them acquiring his startup, wrote a post called How Pinterest Will Transform the Web in 2012. If this is the first time you’ve heard of Pinterest, don’t feel that you’re out of the loop. As a commenter on Hacker News mentioned, “Pinterest is probably the first social network to take off with “normal” people before it took off with alpha geeks.”
The way this website works is by allowing users to visually organize and share online content. As its name implies, Pinterest makes it possible to collect content from across the Internet and “pin” it to a virtual board. If you look at this site’s homepage, you will notice pieces of content with hundreds or even thousands of “repins.” While this concept is similar to using Tumblr for reblogging, the main difference is this form of social curation puts content into structured sets.
Sounds Cool. But Is It Actually Important?
Over the course of six months, Pinterest went from 275,000 monthly visitors to over 11 million. Not only is that a huge jump for the site, but it also reflects a wider trend. As Gil explains in his post, “most users don’t want to take much effort to produce content.” While it’s easy to assume that’s bad news because it means the Internet is being dumbed down, it’s actually great news for people and businesses who are in a position to create interesting content. By harnessing the power of social curation, you can take care of creating content and let other people spread it for you.
How Can Your Business Benefit from Social Content Curation?
Because Pinterest is so heavily driven by images, you may think that it’s not a good fit for marketing your business. However, there are two ways you can overcome what seems like a hurdle. The first is to simply think outside of the box. Although you may be used to only producing blog posts and articles to promote your business, if you allow yourself to think outside of the box, you may discover that there are some great options you simply hadn’t thought of in the past.
The second option is to focus on other social content curation sites that are gaining popularity. Snip.it allows users to collect and organize links to share with others. While there are plenty of images on their homepage, the site is actually driven by the collections of links people share. Because the focus is on full collections, the key to making the most of any promotion you drive through this site is to publish and promote content that’s interesting and serves as a cornerstone resource.
Have you explored any of the social content curation sites?