You’re probably sick of hearing all about the importance of integrating social media into your marketing strategy. You probably already have a strategy in place for leveraging social media for marketing and promotion. And you probably aren’t taking full advantage of it when it comes to promoting and even planning your trade show exhibition. That is unless you are already using Pinterest to help you show off your trade show exhibit and get inspiration for exhibit design in the first place.
If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, you’ll want to climb out from under that rock so we can give you the lowdown. Pinterest is a social media and social networking site similar to Facebook and Twitter, but while those two sites focus on the social network and micro-blogging respectively, Pinterest is much more focused on the visual and it is therefore one of the coolest tools to help you brainstorm some great ideas for your next trade show exhibit as well to promote your display once you are at the show.
Pinterest is a visually based site because you start by either searching for an item like ‘exhibit design’ or following a ‘board’ which has images of a certain theme or grouping. In other words, the site creates an enormous database of virtual pinboards with their associated images, comments and links.
By now, you should be starting to see just how potent a tool this can be for finding inspiration for just about anything, including exhibit design. If you can’t picture it, go to Pinterest.com right now and type in exhibit design or some other similar search term and spend a while scrolling through the results. See, we told you.
But, as we mentioned Pinterest is also great for promotion and marketing. That’s because if you post (or ‘pin’) some cool images, you can gain followers who want to see more. Similar, to how this works with Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter ‘followers’, you can very effectively create buzz around your trade show exhibit and your company. In fact, Pinterest can be even more useful than Facebook or Twitter, because even though those other sites have more users overall, research has shown that people are more than twice as likely to share an image than they are a blog post or tweet.
So, if you haven’t looked into Pinterest, you should bring it up to your (slacking) marketing team or sign up and mess around yourself. You’ll not only be able to generate some great buzz about your company, but also have a bit of fun and maybe find some inspiration for your next exhibit design in the process.