Back in November 2013 Pinterest introduced its ‘Place Pins‘ to give Pinterest users the ability to map their favorite destinations. Pinterest developers had noticed that users were pinning, re-pinning and favoriting over 1.5 million places every day. They wanted to help inspire people to go out and do more things, explore when on vacation. Many users began creating boards centered around their next vacation, adding pins of places they wanted to visit in that specific destination locale, basically creating a mobile-friendly itinerary for themselves and their friends and family.
While Place Pins is great for the average pinner to plan and brainstorm daily vacation activities, they are also a great marketing tactic for the travel and tourism industry. Many vacation rental and resort lodging websites have pages dedicated to local attractions, restaurants, fun family activities, etc. that visitors can use to plan their trip. Why not take these to the next level and expose an audience to your activities pages through social networking. Creating a Pinterest board dedicated to your local restaurants, including a place pin for each and linking the image to your activities landing page, will not only create more website traffic but also help your customer become more familiar with the area and ease the stress of planning activities when traveling.
With Pinterest and all other social networking sites, being mobile friendly and giving access to such activities easily via a mobile device is extremely helpful when the majority of travelers are bringing along their smart phone, tablets and iPads.
So, if you haven’t yet began using Place Pins for your company’s Pinterest Board, I suggest you start. Here are few suggestions for Pinterest board creation that can include mapping and linking. This list could really go on and on so be creative!
- Vacation Homes
- Parks/Beaches
- Hiking Trails
- Attractions
- Restaurants
- Ski Resorts
- Music Venues
- Sports Stadiums
- Medical Facilities
One thing to keep in mind when adding Place Pins, the ability to map depends on FourSquare’s location API. So if a local business isn’t listed in FourSquare you may not be able to ‘map it’. That doesn’t mean you can’t link your image to your website landing page to bring someone there instead. After all, that is the purpose of most social media marketing. Happy mapping!
