Pinterest is one of the best social media platforms to appear in the meetings and events industry. If you have a strong female-to-male attendance ratio, it might be worth a look since more than 80 percent of the current users are women. This is obviously mostly personal use, but Pinterest is moving aggressively toward the business community.
Pinterest is incredibly visual. If you’re working in an industry with lots of visuals – radiology, photography, etc. – Pinterest could be for you. But, as you’ll see, that’s not a requirement. Great images can come from lots of places.
If you still haven’t seen it, think of Pinterest as a wall of bulletin boards. You might have one for recipes and one for pets and one for vacation destinations. On each board you “pin” pictures or videos. Next time you’re looking for a new recipe, you call up that board and see which one looks good.
For you, it’s an organization tool. But here comes the social part – your images can be shared and repined, and your boards (and you) can be followed.
But Pinterest is more than just collections of images – it’s an aspiration platform. People pin things they want to buy, places they want to go, things they want to learn to make and things that motivate them to become the people they want to be. Keep this aspirational aspect in mind as you create your boards and pin content that taps into that.
How to Promote Your Events with These 8 Pinterest Pointers
So how do you translate this to promoting an event? Much of that is still evolving, but consider these ideas as part of your social media strategy:
- Capture images that resonate with the industry or group that your event is targeting. For example, if you’re in the travel industry, great photos of dream destinations would work well.
- Use it to humanize your organization. Put up a board of employee vacation photos, or unique cube décor.
- Help your attendees get to know each other. If you represent the widget industry, have people contribute pictures with their best use of widgets, or their most cost-effective widget installation.
- Create a board of all the new products that will be on display at the event and ask people to comment on the ones they’re most interested in.
- Create a “tip” board with one tip from each of your speakers and pair it with a relevant photo.
- Interesting quotes overlaid on top of matching images perform very well on this platform.
- Crowdsource content or destinations. Put options on a board and let your audience vote.
- Repurpose your YouTube videos here with a video “how-to” board.