Pinterest rolled out free tools and resources for businesses as it continues to explore ways of moving towards monetizing the site, according to Digital Trends.
We want to help more businesses provide great content on Pinterest and make it easy to pin from their websites,” the San Francisco-based social networking company wrote in a post on its blog, adding, “Today, we’re taking a first step toward that goal with some free tools and resources.”
Companies are now invited to open a business account on Pinterest – before now there was just one type of account for all users – with its own specific terms and conditions, which mean the platform can now be officially used for commercial purposes.
A Pinterest business account allows companies to sign up with the name of the company (as opposed to first-name-last-name as before) and go through what Pinterest calls “an optimized user flow” that enables new members to verify that the business owns the website on the Pinterest profile so visitors can “more easily find the business they want in search results”.
It also helps users to add a Pin It button, Follow button, Profile widget, or Board widget “to get more engagement from pinners and traffic back to the site.” Holders of a business account will also receive information on upcoming features “that will provide more powerful ways of reaching and understanding your audience on Pinterest.”
If a company is in two minds about whether to open a Pinterest account, the social networking firm is encouraging it to check out new pages showing case studies and the like, which explain how businesses are already making use of the site.
Pinterest has been gathering members fast since it ended its invitation-only model in August. On top of that, the site, which launched in March 2010, broke into the top 50 chart of most visited U.S. websites for the first time in September with more than 25 million visitors during that month, according to research firm comScore.
Visitor numbers have also been boosted with the recent launch of free apps for Android devices and Apple’s iPad.
