Just recently, Pinterest hit more than 10 million unique visitors, making it one of the fastest growing websites ever. In the past six months, visits to Pinterest grew by 4,000%, receiving 11 million hits in just one week.

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Despite its rapid adoption, I am already hearing, “I don’t get Pinterest,” and to be honest, before I started researching the site, I felt the same way. Let me tell you something, Pinterest is ridiculously simple, and it can make a big impact on your food truck business. I’m not saying this for the sake of jumping on the bandwagon. It’s not just another social media site. This one is different and Pinterest is doing a great job of driving traffic, leads, and sales.

Convert Browsers Into Buyers

What’s unique about Pinterest compared to most social media websites is that it reduces the number of steps from discovery to conversion. This means that visitors from Pinterest convert into leads or sales faster than from other social media sources.

Take Twitter, for example. If a user sees a tweet regarding your products, it’s less likely that a user will buy that product from just one tweet, unless maybe when it’s celebrity-endorsed. Willing to fork over $10k for a Kim Kardashian-sponsored tweet? I didn’t think so.

This is a dream come true for businesses. Pinterest helps increase conversion rates and reduce sales cycles. Who doesn’t love that?

Drive Traffic To Your Website

Ten million unique views isn’t exactly chump change. That’s a lot for any website, but it’s especially noteworthy for one so new. If you use your website to assist the sales and marketing for your food truck or specialty menu items, you need to generate traffic in order to sales. Pinterest is a great tool for increasing links back to your website, thus driving more traffic.

In fact, early research indicates that Pinterest is more effective at steering traffic back to a website compared to other social media sites, even Facebook.

Get More Inbound Links

What’s awesome about Pinterest is that every pin includes a link, leading back to the source of the image. With Pinterest’s growing popularity, this could provide you with very valuable inbound links. While these are no-follow links, any link directing visitors back to your website is always beneficial.

User Engagement Is Addictively High

I’ll admit it, I’m becoming addicted to Pinterest. It happened overnight and without warning. And I’m not alone. I’ve heard the same from many of our readers.

Pinterest users are far from passive. Pinterest users are keenly interested in what’s hot and what’s cool – a behavior that translates well into the kind of influencer marketers desire to attract.

This is a good sign for food truck owners because it means your pins are more likely to be seen, touched, or better yet, go viral. I believe the main reason for such high engagement is that it’s so easy to digest information on Pinterest merely because it’s visual. Scanning tons of images is easier and far more enjoyable than scanning hundreds of tweets, for example.

Integrates With Your Website, Twitter Account, and Facebook Profile

What seems to be a critical factor to success for social media websites is connectivity. These sites can’t get away with being a silo, and Pinterest has identified that right out of the gate.

The site now connects with Facebook enabling users to automatically post new pins to their Facebook news feed for others to see. This means more eyes from other channels get access to the images you post to Pinterest. Unfortunately it only connects with Facebook profiles, not business pages, so there is no way for you to automatically share pins with your food truck pages. In order to do so, you must manually share the link to the pin on your business page.

However, if you sign up for Pinterest using the same email address used for your corporate Twitter account, you can automatically share the pins you post to your Twitter account.

Additionally, you can add a ‘Pin It’ button to their website and blog (similar to other social media sharing buttons). This makes pinning products or visual content for site visitors super easy.

Discover What Your Audience Loves

Pinterest is a great place to discover trends. You can discover what people love to share. You can follow your followers to see what inspires them. This gives you an opportunity to understand what’s hot today and use that information to position your own offers and products. I would imagine that, down the line, Pinterest will eventually make it easy to see trending data in specific categories.

As Pinterest evolves, I’m sure there will be even more great reasons to get your food truck business started on this fast-growing social network. Businesses from other industries are already receiving advantages by leveraging the platform to drive traffic, leads and sales…why shouldn’t you?