According to a new study, Pinterest.com, the social networking website that lets people collect and share photos on a virtual bulletin board, is now driving more referral traffic than YouTube, Reddit and Linkedin combined. In December 2011, Pinterest received 11 million visits in a week, a 400 percent growth in just six months.
Popular categories for Pinterest users include home décor, food and wedding dresses. It even has an iPhone app to allow you to save things that you see online and offline, and explore and repin images your friends collect.
So how can you use Pinterest in the healthcare space? Well, Pinterest has the potential to aggregate diverse content from different parts of the web to help advance education and patient engagement. For example, if you have a center for Parkinson’s patients, you may offer e-books on your website and physical therapy videos on YouTube. These could be pinned on a board called “Various Treatments for Parkinson’s Disease.”
You may also want to create some pins to promote your hospital. Have a pin board showcasing all your physicians, their CVs and departments. You might show various photos of your hospital’s facility and your capabilities.
When you pin your services, you have an opportunity to maximize SEO and drive traffic back to your site. You create quality backlinks whenever you or other users link to your services. When you write descriptions, you can use your targeted keywords, which will attract your target customers and patients and encourage them to visit your site. You can share your pins on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, encouraging more links to your services and, ultimately, your hospital. All of these efforts will help to drive more traffic to your site and to increase your search-engine ranking.
To learn more about how to best use Pinterest, visit http://wax-prod.local or call 305-350-5700.
