Why you should show your product videos on Pinterest

Pinterest's rapid growth means that many more influential consumers are using the pinboard site, and they're looking for material to share.

Videos are becoming a sharable item on Pinterest, and brands can be at the edge of this trend, so why not showcase your product videos to best effect on Pinterest to encourage sharing?

Pinterest may have started out as a favorite site for teenage girls redecorating their bedrooms, but now everyone is making use of its pinboards, from trendsetting designers to corporate marketers.

And the social sharing site is still attracting new users by the truckload: In 2012 Pinterest showed the largest year-over-year increase of all the social networks in terms of both unique audience and time spent on the site, according to Nielsen.

While the site began as a great place to share images, people (and brands) are catching on to the fact that they can also use Pinterest pinboards to share videos.

Pinboard users are increasingly adding videos along with pictures to their pinboards, which means that brands should consider making their videos more available via Pinterest to encourage sharing.

Videos can offer a more powerful impression of a brand or a product that a static image can, and your videos will gain greater viral reach reach via Pinterest's growing audience. Also, they are indexed by the major search engines, giving them even more exposure.

Videos generally have a separate category tab on Pinterest, so it's easy for your Pinterest followers to find videos among the images. It's also easy to make your videos shareable on Pinterest, just as you probably do now with Facebook and Twitter: just place a "pin it" button on your website or blog.

To give your Pinterest videos maximum impact, make sure they include the following elements.

List pricing information

Pinterest allows you to place "price tags" for products on videos, which will be visible in the video's thumbnail image.

Pinterest users like pricing details – according to Digital Journal, pins with a price receive 1.5 likes on average, while pins without a price receive only 1.1 likes on average.

Use full descriptions

Take advantage of the ability to add descriptions to your videos, so that users know what they'll be watching. Make sure to add keywords that are crucial to your SEO campaigns.

Choose the best thumbnail image

You may already know that when you post videos on YouTube or your own website, you need to select a thumbnail image that tells the product story.

Pinterest users make quick decisions on whether or not to watch your video, so an arresting image can encourage them to click through and watch.

Add a call to action and URL

This is always a good practice for videos, but it makes a lot of sense on Pinterest. A 2012 poll from marketing firm Steelhouse discovered that Pinterest users are twice as likely as Facebook users to buy products they see on pinboards.

Consider telling potential customers to buy a product, visit your customer forums, or benefit from sales or shipping deals.

Add a URL to make sure that as your video gets pinned eslewhere, viewers will know where to go to get the product.

Think concise

Pinterest appeals to users because it doesn't require much reading – pinboard images can be browsed quickly. Your videos should be short and easy to understand in order to encourage viewing and sharing.

Before you begin adding videos to Pinterest, examine how popular Pinterest merchants, such as artisan product site Daily Grommet, are using video along with images to create lively pinboards. You'll get a good sense of the Pinterest community and how your videos can combine with other pinned materials to showcase your brand.