I must admit, I discovered Pinterest several months before my wife did. I had heard about this exploding new social photo sharing site. It was mostly women, I was told, “pinning” photos of their favorite recipes, gardens, clothing, etc. Their pins were posted on theme based “boards” and through “repins” could be shared across the web. Cute, I thought, but nothing there for me.

One morning I was alerted by Google that new information was posted on RTF doors. When I clicked on the link, much to my surprise, it was a Pinterest page. The page was owned by a major kitchen refacing franchise and had a board titled RTF Doors. Now this I was interested in and decided to keep an eye on the page…um…I mean board.

I forgot all about it until one day I was playing around on the Google Keyword Tool looking for potential blog topics for a client’s website.I would check the number of monthly local (US) searches on a particular keyword and then do a search on the same to see what came up. When I checked RTF doors what do you think I found about halfway down page 1? You guessed it! I found the same Pinterest board on RTF doors.

Since that time the ranking for this board has fallen back some, probably because it wasn’t being updated or promoted through other social networking avenues to keep traffic coming to it. It could also be that Google is changing its algorithms for search ranking and reducing the power of Pinterest. Regardless of the cause, I was awakened to how powerful this service could be when used in conjunction with other social networking opportunities.

Here’s the beauty of Pinterest. You can post a photo of your work on your website or blog and then pin that photo on one of your Pinterest boards. If it’s a beautiful photo of good work, others will find it and the repins begin. As people view the photo they will see the original source of the photo. When they click on the photo, or the source link, they will end up at the source. See where this is going?

Now you begin your own campaign using Twitter to promote your Pinterest pins, just like you should already be doing to promote your other social media pages. Through consistent activity and linking to relevant content related to your industry, interest in your Twitter activity begins to grow. You’d be surprised how much attention you can get with 140 characters.

There is so much more we could discuss about this topic. However, as I write this it is IWF eve and I need to get nestled into bed with visions of routers and membrane presses dancing in my head. You can keep up with the show via twitter using the hashtags #IWFAtlanta, #IWF2012, and #3DLaminating.

If you’d like to say hi I will be in Booth 7021, Smartech International.