Are you looking for a hassle-free way to increase company branding with measurable results? Many businesses are turning to social networking websites for content marketing and to increase brand awareness. One innovative idea that businesses can use to help build brand awareness is the website Pinterest.

If you are a member of other social networking sites, you would have already seen posts about images your friends have added to their boards on Pinterest. This website allows users to select images from around the Web and put them on a masonry-style pinboard. The pinned images are then shared with followers and friends. This is the basic concept behind Pinterest, but you may still be asking yourself: how can it be used for company branding?

Let's think about this for a minute. High quality images and videos that can be pinned for people to view could be about almost anything. These can be images of your company's name and business logo or videos about featured products. For example, your company name and website address can be circulated using this image-sharing site. Not only will users of Pinterest see it, but these images can be circulated across multiple social networking sites. Consequently, this will lead to increased visitors to your website. While some networking sites rely more on what users can read, Pinterest caters to those who are more interested in what they can see. At the moment this happens to be over one million people daily.

Blatant company advertising is not allowed to be placed as images and videos on pinboards, but everything else is fair game. Think of what could be considered interesting to users: Images of a recent educational seminar? A behind the scenes view of your company offices? Some of the best images "pinned" are those that tell a story, invoke an emotion or a combination of both.

Once you have a Pinterest account, you can place these images and videos on your company's blog for other pinners to find. You can also encourage people to pin your content by providing relevant tags and a "Pin It" button next to the content. This will make it easy for pinners to bookmark your images onto the Pinterest website. Remember, the benefits to using Pinterest to increase company brand awareness relies heavily on the content that is shared. Therefore the quality and the subject nature of the visual image you provide will be essential.

There are different ways you can increase the use of this visual content and get people to spread the word about your business. What about having your own company pinboard? This is an affordable marketing tool, but an effective one. Many businesses also watermark their images with the company's website address. Place the watermark in an area of the image that is not obtrusive, as pinners prefer images that are not obscured.

Remember that Pinterest is just a hassle-free way to use the popularity of social media to your advantage, but it's only as effective as you make it.