Social media
What’s Pinterest and How to Use It for Marketing Your Brand?
Filed under: Brands, Business, Social Media, Trends
In December 2011 I reported that there was a new entry to the list of top 10 US social networking sites. It’s Pinterest. Pinterest debuted with almost the same market share a s Google+. So what’s Pinterest?
Wikipedia tells us that:
Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. Users label and create theme-based image boards.
I have to say that I didn’t pay much attention to that site. But that changed as we got a pretty impressive peak of traffic from that site. Before January 14 we had practically zero visits from Pinterest and then it exploded.
The image that did it for us was Facebook Cheat Sheet. The image got pinned and repinned hundreds of times generating about 10 thousand visits to our site.
In some sense Pinterest is similar to StumbleUpon. However, I noticed that during the the peak in visits from Pinterest we had also a measurable growth in traffic from other social networking sites. This suggest that users on Pinterest tend to reshare the content to other social neworking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
This got me really interested and after some digging I found that Pinterest is growing like crazy. On this Experian Hitwise graph you can see how Pinterest reached 11 million visits per week in December 2011.
So what’s Pinterest?
Pinterest is an online pinboard that allows you to collect and display the images you find on the web. You can find boards from other people to discover new things and get inspiration from others. You can use Pinterest to plan their a vacation, decorate your home and share your favorite fashion items.
First of all Pinterest is really visual. If you find something that pleases the eye then you would like to pin it on Pinterest. This means that the most active categories on the site tend to be interior design, travel destinations, hobbies, fashion, food, etc.
When you open up the home page of site you will see images of resorts, shoes, pies, furniture, and so forth. And this focus also shows when you take a look at the categories list.
Experian Hitwise says that:
Pinterest visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category (versus the online population) which is expected given the abundance of crafts content on the website. [...] This group of consumers is characterized as baby boomers and young adults who are heavy web users who spend time on house and garden, sports and fitness, and family-oriented websites.
Pinterest and social media marketing
Pinterest will work for your marketing if your business is about home décor, fashion, travel, design furniture… Everything you can eat with your eyes goes. Images that people dream about or collect to get inspired will get pinned.
For example my business partner creates wooden flooring and uses really innovative technology to do that. We talked about his site and I suggested that Pinterest might be a great match for his business. I started to show him how to use Pinterest and we found that there were already hundreds of pins with people expressing their interest in their products.
9 specific marketing tactics for Pinterest
1. Promote a lifestyle that your brand enables. Give people ideas and inspire them. This will lead to sharing your content with friends and family.
2. Run a contest where you let people pin your product images or take pictures of themselves using you brand.
3. Share great content from others that you can’t re-post to your site then use Pinterest to get it to your audience. For example we pin interesting social media marketing infographics to our pinboard.
4. Pin first, tweet later. If you find something visual that you would usually tweet about, such as infographic, then pin it to Pinterest first and then tweet about the pin.
5. Sell your products. If you add $ or £ sign to a number in your pin description than Pinterest will automatically generate a price tag on the pin.
6. Create pinnable content! When creating content think really hard about the images you use. Are they pinnable? After discovering Pinterest I have a constant desire to illustrate the social media marketing materials we create, so that they would get more traction on Pinterest.
7. Use “Pin It button”. We added this button to our own site just to test it as we don’t have much visual content but even now some of our posts get pinned. So if you have anything visual to share use it!
8. Add a “follow me on Pinterest” button to your web site.
9. Don’t pin just your own content. Create relationships by repinning images from other users and give value to your own followers by helping them discover new things.
Now go for a test drive with Pinterest. Let us know in the comments what ideas do you have about using Pinterest for marketing your brand.
Check out 41 Great Examples of Pinterest Brand Pages
I started using Pinterest about two weeks ago. What I decided to do was create a social media recap type product I call – The Content Creation Curation… A visual representation of the week that way in social media blog articles…
I think the grouping and easy sharing make the social network a great resource.
Thanks for a fantastic article.
Ryan H
Thanks Ryan. My experience with Pinterest is about as long as yours and it seems really great.
Pingback: Why I Chose Pinterest for the Content Creation Curation | Ryan Hanley
Time will tell how it benefits the bottom line for brands but it looks good so far. I run a travel site and rather than just re-pinning nice pictures like alot of other brands using it, we have decided to use Pinterest solely as an adventure holiday shop window, each board categorised around the themes of the trips we aggregate on Much Better Adventures. Every picture is a trip that can be booked direct and is priced and linked. Here is our board: http://pinterest.com/muchbetteradven/ if you’d like to use it as another good example of how Pinterest works well for the travel industry. Cheers! Sam
Thanks for adding your experience with Pinterest. Your presence looks great on Pinterst. Any stats on sales?
Thanks Priit. It’s actually quite an enjoyable experience creating the boards unlike most online accounts! Probably too early to tell for sales but I will write an article about Pinterest in a month or two about the results on our blog at http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/news so keep an eye out for that. Cheers!
Thanks Sam. In your field Pinterest seems like a natural thing to use. Let us know how it goes.
According to a Shareaholic study, Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic to other sites than Google+, YouTube, and Linkedin combined. It’s working for many brands, products, and services already.
It’s also great to see specific marketing tactics in your article as they really do need to be different than those used on other social networks in order to take advantage of the unique demographics, visual power, and aspirational lifestyles on Pinterest. I’ve got some specific pin selection and copy tips on PinBliss.com at http://pinbliss.com/pin-selection-and-content/.
Leon
Pinterest Marketing Bible
pinterestbible.com
Available for Kindle, Nook, Print
What are your thoughts regarding Pinterest for B2B?
We are doing it. No real business results yet (only 2 weeks into it) but Pinterest sends a lot of traffic.
Just joined pinterest and seemed to take forever to get the official invite. I think it is an excellent resource on a variety of levels and key topics. Recently had to totally delete my facebook and business fan page and start all over with better focus and content. Pinterest is a major part of that focus and content.
PS If this shows up twice sorry – Didn’t see my post so not sure if it posted :-/
Thanks for the info. Please keep me informed of any updates or other info not related to pinterest. Thanks Gary
If you read Pinterests ‘rules’ : you are not meant to put your own work/products on there or ‘market’ yourself. It’s all too lovely. Are you?
Quote from Pinterest’s etiquette guideline: “Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.” I’d interpret that as you should not ONLY post promotional material but it doesn’t say anywhere that posting promotional material is not allowed. You shouldn’t spam Pinterest with too much content but that goes with any marketing channel really. If you stick to posting promotional material that is valuable for others, by all means, do it
That’s my 2c.
We have started doing product and company highlights and posting them on pinterest. Two days in a nd it is driving traffic.
http://www.retailpitch.com we are a b2b