Which social networking service should you focus on if you want to maximize your sales? This Pinterest vs Facebook comparison will tell you the answer.

Follow the rules

Up until now, Pinterest has been a relatively rule-free place for brands. Brands have been able to use the site in pretty much any way they want to with little to no limitations on promotions or running competitions. But with the new business profiles, Pinterest has launched a new set of guidelines that brands have to follow. The business terms of use can be found here and feature important rules such as:

Owning your content
As is the way with Facebook, Pinterest’s terms for brands state that any content you upload onto your profile essentially remains the property of Pinterest, even after you delete your account. They state specifically that “Pinterest and its users may retain and continue to use, store, display, reproduce, re-pin, modify, create derivative works, perform, and distribute any of your User Content that other users have stored or shared through Pinterest.” The inclusion of users here is quite vague as it doesn’t cover whether this use or modification of your works extends beyond the Pinterest platform, which may cause concern for many brands.

Use of information
Pinterest’s business terms now state that if you incorporate Pinterest features onto your site or app that “Pinterest may collect and use information from you and your users as described in our Privacy Policy”. This is a fairly standard practice for web services now, particularly given the importance of data generation as a currency for social networks to trade with among advertisers.

Thousands of businesses have become part of our community, giving great ideas, content and inspiration to people on Pinterest. Whether it’s Anthropologie sharing awesome clothes, Whole Foods sharing tasty recipes, the Smithsonian sharing fascinating collections, or Amazon making products easy to pin, many of us have been inspired on Pinterest by businesses. We want to help more businesses provide great content on Pinterest and make it easy to pin from their websites. Today, we’re taking a first step toward that goal with some free tools and resources.

New business terms

We now have two sets of terms—one for people and one for businesses. The business terms help guide businesses on how to use Pinterest. They also enable us to separate the provisions meant for businesses from those meant for regular people. As a result, we updated our user terms to be half as long. We also took the opportunity to simplify the language as much as possible. Unfortunately, terms of use are one of those documents that requires a certain amount of legalese, so we’ve offered “translations” of these sections, too.

Infographic highlighting data about social media marketing usage from the 2012 SEOmoz industry survey.

The first statistic highlighted on our infographic reveals that 44.4% of survey respondents self-professed either “advanced” or “expert” level social media ability. This shows that marketers are feeling an increased sense of ability to tackle what was once thought of as a new and unknown technology.

To little surprise in the social media marketing world, Facebook and Twitter lead as the most popular social network. In fact, our own social media lead generation team at HubSpot is big advocates for these two networks! What is surprising, however, is that Google+ emerges as the third most popular network. Google+ has historically been plagued with the "useless" label when it comes to generating social ROI, so one theory behind this ranking could be the high impact Google+ has on SEO.

While LinkedIn falls behind in fifth place, it turns out that 74.1% of marketers use LinkedIn for branding. I found this to be particularly interesting since LinkedIn Company Pages do not provide many options for branding. While they can update their status and add a company logo, marketers don't have the more advanced branding capabilities that they have on more visual networks such as Facebook or Pinterest. One theory behind this statistic could be branding via employees. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for showing off the wonderful talent your employees bring to your company.

Lastly, it turns out that 60.2% of marketers are looking for analysis options, as well as other analytics options, in their social media management tools. This comes as no surprise. When savvy social media marketers are communicating their messages online, they want to know exactly how those efforts are benefiting them by analyzing whether each social strategy is connecting to their end goal: revenue. Tools that report on social media analytics are becoming more and more in demand among marketers, which is exactly why the HubSpot team has worked so hard to provide reach metrics and CTR on all your social media messages, as well as ROI metrics like closed-loop reporting on leads and customers generated from social media, all within the HubSpot Social Media tool.

If you’re clever, you can make Pinterest work for B2B - by thinking about it less as a tool for e-commerce but more as a visual representation of what you do.

Everybody is still talking about Pinterest. In the last year the site has gone from having 700,000 unique users to over 20 million. The site has a strong bias towards the B2C (business to consumer) sector – interiors, style, food and crafts are the most pinned categories on the site.

That said, if you’re clever, you can make Pinterest work for B2B too – by thinking about it less as a tool for e-commerce but more as a visual representation of what you do. Here’s how:

• Pinterest as a showcase for your business – Think about what you do, the key topics in your sector and what your target market might be interested in is a great place to start. Make sure you have a full profile, including your social network links, profile picture, bio and, most importantly, a link to your website.
• Start with a company information board -This is the place to tell people about what you do, link people to your websites and social networks – it is your business in a visual format. Check out the ‘Find us’ board we set up for Our Social Times here.
• Optimise your website for Pinterest – Make your site more visual with images that can be pinned, and add a ‘Pin It’ button to your site so people visiting can add to their Pinterest boards. Create a board with pins showing what you do, whether you offer services such as accountancy or products like heavy machinery.
• Infographics – These are really popular on Pinterest, and chances are there will be one related to your sector. Search on Pinterest for keywords, make your own infographics or find infographics using sites like visual.ly. Pin and repin them and feature them on your Facebook page.
• Free downloads, eBooks and white papers - These make great reasons to click through from Pinterest to your site. Give each an attractive cover image/page and pin this to your board, then link through to your website where people sign up to receive the paper by email. This way you’ll build a better Pinterest profile and grow your email list at the same time.
• Find your counterparts - This might be clients, colleagues or industry blogs. Follow their boards, repin their content and, off Pinterest, start pinning images, blog posts, infographics that would be interesting to your followers.
• Cross promote – Think about Pinterest as a way to feed content in to your other social networks. Images, infographics and video all transfer really well, especially to your Facebook page. Be selective about this though, you don’t want to flood your networks with Pinterest content.
• Be social – Repin, comment and follow others. By networking on the site you’ll build more followers and your pins will be repinned more often. Find people who are interested in the same subjects as you and repin their pins that would be interesting to your audience.

So you've written a killer blog post, and you've pretty much mastered the art of effectively spreading the word via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the other social media oldies. But what about Pinterest, the Web's newest social media heavyweight?

Pinterest, albeit relatively new to the social realm, has managed to claim a huge following in a short time. The image-driven social network has also become one of the top sources of traffic for many websites.

Not to mention... Pinterest is undoubtedly a godsend for retailers and artists because it gives them a chance to easily show off and share images of their products and creations.

However, if you're a blogger or content marketer who uses words more than pictures, generating buzz using Pinterest may not be as easy.

Thankfully, though, with the help of the right tools, content marketers can get in on the Pinterest fun. Check out the following websites, and learn how you can create pins for words, track your campaigns, and make the most of your content on Pinterest.