New forms of social media are constantly arriving in various shapes and forms. The dominating social media sites currently are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Foursquare (Google+ perhaps?). But there are new kids on the block that are taking words away and replacing them with pictures as a means to communicate.

Instagram, with its recent sale to Facebook for around $1b, is one big player in this space. The Instagram App allows you to take pictures from your mobile phone and quickly transfer them to the internet, using different “filters’ to alter the picture. You can view what friends are posting on Instagram and have the option to share on other social media sites as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Flickr. You can give the picture a caption and ‘geotag’ to let people know where you took the picture.

Pinterest is a site that allows you to ‘Pin’ pictures from other websites into albums and folders to share with others. So this is a great way for people with similar interests to share pictures. Pinterest does encourage ‘Pinners’ to declare the website where the picture was pinned from.

How Business Can Use Instagram and Pinterest.

So my question with this is whether Instagram was going to allow photo’s to be shared directly to Pinterest?

“You shouldn’t need to be too worried if that doesn’t happen as you can pin images that are on websites (including individual posts). So your intention then would be to use an interesting image with a quality post. Then pin the image (linked to the source URL). If your image is re-pinned you should see a spike in traffic.” says Leesa Watego of Iscariot Media.

So if I have interesting photo’s that people will ‘pin’ and ‘re-pin’ linked to my website, I will see a spike in traffic to my website from the picture , especially if it is related to the website content. If my website content is of high quality and of interest to those leads generated from the Pinterest picture, then I should see an increase in traffic to my website. Which leads us back to the point, that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ at a glance. Pictures are a way to attract people to our website. So Instagram and Pinterest have a valuable place in many businesses as a social media communication and marketing tool. Especially for those businesses where it is very difficult to say in words what you do, how you do it and how great a product you have. So if you are considering if Pinterest and Instagram is for you as a social media tool, my advice is to get in and try it.

~ Damien Foley