We've been having a great time playing with Pinterest, the big social networking phenomenon of the year. I was browsing recently and came across a problem with a pin and discovered two key things that you shouldn't do when pinning on Pinterest.

1. Don't directly upload images to Pinterest

The first is you should never directly upload an image to the Pinterest site. The point of sharing a pin on Pinterest is that it directs you somewhere online. Each pin acts as a visual representation of a webpage or article. The reason Pinterest is so great for business is that it drives traffic to your site. Mashable highlighted a study which showed that Pinterest drives more traffic than Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn combined! If you upload an image directly to Pinterest it just sits on Pinterest's servers but doesn't point anywhere - useless!

Click on our pin here to see what happens: 

So any pin you add to Pinterest you should add FROM the place you're trying to direct people to - so upload your pin/image to your website or blog and THEN pin it to one of your boards.

2. Don't use a URL shortener to share a link in the description

The second thing NOT to do on Pinterest is to add a shortened link to your pin description. It's definitely worth giving every pin you add to Pinterest a full description - you have 500 characters to fill with your keywords - so use that space. Feel free to share a link in the description but don't add a shortened link using a service like bit.ly - it turns out Pinterest blocks them for spam. I got this error message: 

To learn more about how you can use Pinterest for your business check out our Slideshare presentation: