Pinterest for Florists

As of 2012, Pinterest is officially hot property. Cue one million “Pinterest for florists” how-to blog posts about using Pinterest to drive traffic to your florist website, sell more flowers, become an Internet floristry superstar, yadda, yadda, yadda…

Q. What is Pinterest? A. Catnip for Brides

I first heard about Pinterest about 6 months ago when a florist mentioned it on the phone, describing it as “catnip for brides”. I checked it out and even though I thought it looked cool, I forgot about it, mainly because I look at so many new social media sites (it’s all a digital-blur, daaahling).

But another florist mentioned it soon after, then another, then suddenly, in 2012, all of the blogs and email newsletters that I follow about marketing started raving about Pinterest.

How to Use Pinterest

Actually, this is not strictly a “how to” article because I do not intimately know Pinterest yet, but as it is such an apparently suitable medium for the visual language of flowers, I am dipping my toes in the water – despite slight reluctance to open yet another front in the war for your attention!

Basically it is a pin-up board based social networking site. You create boards around areas of interest (weddings, floristry, monster trucks, that kind of thing) and then you pin your own photos (or videos) to it. Then you do a lot of surfing around looking at what everybody else has “pinned” and if you love something, you “re-pin” it to your own relevant board.

And, y’know, you make lots of “friends”.

Why Should A Florist Care About Pinterest?

To me it looks like a great idea for florists to be getting into – Pinterest is visual, flowers are visual, you can link images back to your own site and build your personal or business brand – it seems to make total sense. Time will tell I suppose.

Here are some florist Pinterest profiles:

http://pinterest.com/consueloc/florist/

http://pinterest.com/sandec/floral-fetish/

http://pinterest.com/nineblooms/

Promote Your Wedding Flowers on Pinterest

Of course, being mainly all about photos, the first thing you’ll need is decent photographs of your floristry work. Thankfully, any florist doing weddings tends to have some of these handy (be sure the photographer is cool with you using the photos online first though).

If you don’t do weddings, well then get some decent photos of your work done. I cannot see this being avoided in this day and age if you want to be competitive.

One of the most noticeable ways people use Pinterest that is of relevance to florists is to collate and share pin up boards of wedding ideas as they prepare for their big day. It seems like a no-brainer for florists to have their stuff up there and to be encouraging brides-to-be to freely share and promote your work to their network.

http://pinterest.com/yzzzzzz/wedding-ideas/

http://pinterest.com/divya/flowers/

http://pinterest.com/scrapwedo/wedding-flowers-bouquets/

Pin Other People’s Stuff

Think of “pinning” the same as “sharing” on Facebook. It is not claiming ownership of other people’s work, it is simply drawing attention to it, saying “hey, how cool is this? Me likey!”

Follow the general social media rule of thumb and share other people’s stuff. Just pinning your own stuff is a bit self-serving and probably not as interesting as showcasing a wider range of images.

Link Back To Everything

Give credit for where you source something. When repaid in kind, this will hopefully drive traffic back to your website or Facebook page (which seems to integrate very easily with Pinterest).

Business Profile or Personal Profile?

Currently Pinterest does not offer business profiles, so businesses are hacking personal profiles. This is fine as far as it goes, but I wonder what happens then if Pinterest turn around and offer business profiles and get all retentive about the rules, like Facebook and Google? It probably doesn’t matter but I wish it was clearer. Maybe I am the retentive one!

While I will be creating a branded “business” profile for Tesselaars, if I were running a small floristry or events business where I was chief cook and bottle wash, I would consider sticking to the personal profile format and using this to draw attention to my work.

Well, I am off now to experiment with Pinterest. I will report back, but meantime are any of you using Pinterest? If so please tell us about your experiences or give us any advice either below in the comments or over at our Facebook page. Happy pinning!

Written by Seamus – Tesselaar’s website manager and marketing nerd