If you’re as into social media as I am, you too may have been excited about the latest news from Pinterest – verified business accounts have arrived! Pinterest has also announced that new tools will soon be available to businesses to set their accounts apart from personal pages. We still aren’t sure what these tools might be, but they’re likely to include some back-end analytics, and maybe even a means to conduct a Pinterest contest without relying on a third party.

If you’ve been skeptical about using Pinterest for your business, now is the time to take it into consideration – especially if your target audience is women who enjoy curating information. As with any new platform, it’s important to make sure that Pinterest fits into your social strategy before diving in head first. However, if you need an incentive to start your decision-making process, here are 5 reasons we think you should ‘get Pinterested’:

5 Reasons to use Pinterest for business

1. Drive traffic to your website or blog – In multiple studies, Pinterest has been shown to direct more traffic than Yahoo organic search, Bing, Twitter, and Google+ combined. And, according to Real Simple, Pinterest refers more visitors to its site than Facebook!
2. Another avenue to engage with your audience – One of the best ways to measure engagement with your content (no matter the channel) is to look at the amount of time users spend with it. According to ComScore, Pinterest users spend an average of 15.8 minutes on the site per visit, which is more than the average time spent on Facebook and Twitter combined.
3. Expand your reach – With each new pin to one of your boards, you gain another opportunity to reach someone new. Especially so if a user “repins” your post. It’s very similar to the Twitter model, because the potential reach of each piece of content is exponential.
4. Drive purchases – Are you a retailer? Pinterest is a great way to drive actual sales. A study by Shopify shows that Pinterest users not only buy the products they pin, but they also spend more on average than Facebook users. In fact, shoppers referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to make a purchase than visitors who arrive from other social networks!
5. Use it for market research – Search a topic of interest to your brand or consumers of your brand. What are people pinning related to that topic? Use the Popular Pinterest Board to find out what new and unique things are trending each day.