April 29, 2014

Re-Pinning the benefits: Pinterest-ing growth insights

April 29, 2014

Re-Pinning the benefits: Pinterest-ing growth insights

Re-Pinning the benefits: Pinterest-ing growth insights

Mirror mirror on the wall, which social media is the fairest of all? Well, I must say the past few months have been a social media learning curve for me. I thought I knew most of the ins and outs when I started working for Bang Online - turns out I was just skimming the top of the iceberg.

I have personally initiated myself into the world of social media, firing up pages on LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. These were added to my current pages - Facebook, SnapChat and Tumblr. I must say, its quite a juggling act but seeing how all of these wonderful platforms work is making me love the journey through social media cyberspace.I have asked myself this month, which one of these has stood out for me (as a new user) and which one has the most potential for businesses? The clear leader for me is Pinterest. I say this with a wealth of supporting evidence behind me, with bloggers, news agencies, and studies all showing its growth and popularity. Not only is it so easy to use, fun to look at, and a very useful tool for ‘Pinners’, it is also a brilliant marketing tool for businesses and is leading the way in terms of social referrals.Pinning down the evidenceFacebook has been the leader in social referrals for a long time, but Pinterest is emerging as next best thing according to new data by Shareaholic. Shareaholic conducted a study of the top eight social media platforms traffic referrals over 300,000 webpages reaching over 400 million visitors monthly. During the first quarter of 2014 Pinterest’s social referral share grew by 48.36% with a total 7.1% share of overall traffic. This is less than Facebook’s 21.25%, however the growth is much steeper with Pinterest and it seems to be leading the pack over the other six platforms by a long shot.In another article by Entrepreneur, ShareThis found that Pinterest users had more sharing activity than users of Facebook or Twitter in 2013. The question then only lies with if this can translate into brand awareness, sales, and traffic to your website?[caption id="attachment_2594" align="alignnone" width="300"]

http://blog.shareaholic.com/social-media-traffic-trends-04-2014/

Source: Shareaholic[/caption]What is Pinning good for?Pinterest’s growth can be accounted to the fact that it is fantastic for both users and for marketers. Pinterest is essentially a collection of photos (tied to links from the web) which users can ‘Pin’ to their ‘Boards’ for reading/looking at/inspiration. Pinners use Pinterest as a tool for exploring ideas visually. A business can quite easily become involved in this world of pictures, and it can be a great tool for almost any type of business that can find some content to deliver.Some ways to use Pinterest for your business:

  • Linking your blog articles to an image and sharing on Pinterest
  • Showcasing photos of your products for users to Pin and collate on boards
  • The text descriptions of images can become a great SEO tool
  • You can build a following by posting inspirational pictures for your followers
  • Creating infographics is a great way to build a good rapport with users and provide information about your skills, products, or ideas
  • You can also build relationships on Pinterest through re-pinning images and liking images of other companies or people
  • Users often re-Pin items they want to buy or information they want to read, this can give you insight into what your target market wants from you

The game planThe Pinterest team has just introduced a new tool called Guided Search, which will help Pinners find what they are looking for based on the Pin descriptions they enter. If your content and descriptions are optimised correctly it will more likely be picked up by the Guided Search.Pinterest can be considered a little bit of uncharted territory for some businesses as the obvious answers for social media strategies are usually Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. This platform is going to become a dominant player if its recent surge in growth is anything to go by. A game plan is essential in this quickly changing field of social media - if your business would like to look ahead, contact Bang Online today to get started.