Social Network Pinterest Creates a Community For Furniture

Before the Las Vegas Furniture Market I had never heard of Pinterest, a new social networking platform involving pictures from the web. It's the latest social media craze to organize your favorite images from around the Web. When you see an image on the Web you want to "pin" or scrapbook as it were, you can easily use the plugin to keep track of this picture. I'll spare you all the details because you can go to the site and they easily walk you through how to set up individual scrapbooks and how to pin to each.

In all candor, I am not personally a big online social networking kind of guy, but I pay attention to the trends from a marketing point of view. Pinterest has a lot of buzz right now because it has grown very quickly in the last several months to over 5,000,000 users.

In the furniture world I must have heard or seen a dozen references to Pinterest from different sources while at the market. Here's why I think Pinterest will be interesting for our industry.

1) This will allow designers to show off their projects so others can see what kind of work they do

2) It allows furniture stores another platform for showing the newest product introductions.

3) It allows retailers to highlight different categories of the store that may not always be thought of.

4) It appears to be a Fantasy Football type activity for females which appeals to the obvious driver of home furnishings purchases.

5) It looks like people who do arts and crafts, scrapbooking, fashion and home décor are big audiences. These people are ripe targets for furniture prospects.

6) It will allow creative design types to get inspiration from what others are doing.

7) When you pin something, it gives a reference back to the website it came from inviting people to go see other selections just like it.

I have not used it yet so I cannot speak of the attributes for reps. I went on the site and pinned one item from my own website. I was then able to post a like on my facebook page and tweet it to my list all under a minute. I could have also easily emailed a picture to someone on my list if I so chose. As a furniture retailer or interior designer begins to develop out their social media sites from Facebook, to twitter to email, this seems like a natural addition for a fashion industry such as ours to add to the arsenal.

You can see my one pin I did for a test at http://pinterest.com/pin/242701867388642975. What's great about it was by clicking the picture they could find their way back to my site.

I'm no expert on this but if you start nosing around in it you will find some people to follow. I'm only bringing this up because I heard so much buzz at market about it and thought you should be aware of it for our industry.

As always let me know your thoughts. If you are a Pinterest advocate by all means share your success stories below.

Thanks, Mike

PS. Within five minutes of posting this Pinterest picture, I had my college roommate in Seattle post on my Facebook page that he wanted one. I also had one of my customers begin following me on Pinterest. Don't underestimate the power of this social networking stuff to drive your business.