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“Pinned It!” – Pinterest really is the next big thing in Social Media

Everywhere I go, friends and family, co-workers, and clients, are “pinning” their favorite finds to the virtual boards they’ve created on Pinterest. At work, a fellow account manager noticed a huge spike in traffic that after some investigation was attributed to the referring site. My best friend and bride-to-be is always asking me to check out her “wedding board” for feedback on bridesmaids dress and accessories selection. And clients have asked me to look into using Pinterest for marketing their website recipes to the millions of users who are sharing them already (and causing those fortuitous spikes in website traffic!).

For those of you who aren’t “pinning” yet (trust me, you will), let me explain what Pinterest is. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard, started by a former Facebook executive, that allows you to “pick up” things you like from the web and “pin” and organize them on 1 or more of the “pinboards” you’ve created with appropriate metadata. Once there, you can follow other “pinners”, “repin” and like the things you see in the community, and invite friends to join you. Side note: I haven’t seen so many occurrences of a site being used interchangeably as a noun, verb, and proper noun since a little company (hint: starts with a G) that you may or may not have heard about, came out.Image may be NSFW.
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Pinterest Living Room

The site is now pulling in more pageviews than Etsy and has grown 2,000% since June, with more than 421 million pageviews and 3 million users since October. And for those brands who have seen success marketing to Mommy Bloggers in the past, you will be happy to know that from May to October 2011, there was an 1100% increase in unique mom visitors to Pinterest. And the icing on the proverbial cake? Moms spend an average of 13.7 minutes per visit. Yeah, it’s pretty much going to be the next big thing.

So, last week, I decided to find out what all this “pinning” business was about and opened an account through an invitation I received from a friend. Note that you can go to Pinterest.com and request an invite like I did over a week ago; I’m still waiting.

All I can say is prepare to be addicted. Within the first 24 hours of my “research”, I had created 5 boards – Xmas Gifts, Places I’d like to go, New ‘do (for hairstyles), Living Room, Fave San Diego restaurants, and Favorite Recipes. I also added the Pin It button to my browser toolbar so I could easily pin my finds to my various boards. There are only a handful of sites I visit often like MarthaStewart.com that I’ve seen the Pin It button added to their content, so the toolbar addon is essential.

There are so many reasons why I’m pinning my finds on Pinterest instead of my former methods of organization like emailing my Gmail account to organize with labels or creating a Google doc containing links to design inspiration for our new home with my husband. (There’s that G-word again).

Why Pinterest Will Succeed

  • First, it’s visual. I love that I only see the pictures representing the content with only a few words for a description. It makes it much easier to make a decision on which birthday cake recipe to make or the couch to buy for the living room without all of that text as a distraction.
  • Second, it’s simple. There are only a few actions available: pin, repin, like, or follow. I didn’t need to “figure out” what any of those actions meant (a-hem, G-word again) or how to start pinning. It was easy to get started day 1 and several friends, family members, and acquaintances were already there.
  • Third, it really feels like a community instead of just telling me it is one. It sort of reminds me of going to a clothing exchange with your best friends. Here I’ll give the leather jacket I got on a college trip to Italy for the skinny jeans you’re never going to wear again (sorry, you’re not). I found the item (pin), you like it (like), and I got some use out of it, but maybe you can use it (repin); and if you like a lot of the other items in my closet maybe you’ll use several of the items (follow).

Image may be NSFW.
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Pinterest Recipe
And one of the coolest things about Pinterest to me, like a bonus feature, is just seeing how others tag your pins when they repin them. For example, I tagged my pin of the Make Room Planner on UrbanBarn.com with “Design a room.” in my living room board and one user repinned it as “Design a room. So useful.” in their “For the home” board and another user tagged it with simply “Awesome.” in their “Dream House” board.

Same scenario can be seen for interior design (someone’s “couch” is another’s “paint color”), recipes (“Christmas Eve” or “Weekday dinners”), weddings, travel destinations, books you want to read, or the endless other boards.

 

So, what can brand marketers like SiteLab Interactive and our clients take away from Pinterest?

  1. Schedule a photo shoot. Those old recipe photos from the 90s when your first website was built aren’t going to work anymore.
  2. A picture is worth a thousand dollars. Your Pinterest-friendly content (which is most) needs photos. Products without photos are not going to be purchased.
  3. Make sharing easy. Find out which social media communities your customers participate in most and make it easy for them to share your website’s content in them easily through social media bookmarking tools like AddThis and comments.
  4. New platform. Huge opportunity. Recipes, design inspiration, and wedding planning are played out. Users have each other to find and share that content. Brands on Pinterest need to offer value to their followers through creative discoveries relevant to their industry. For example, check out a “Pinboard of Pins” from the co-founder of Pinterest, Evan Sharp. And, there have already been a few marketing campaigns hosted by brands on the site like Lands’ End Canvas Pin It to Win It campaign.
  5. It’s more about discovery than search. Keep this in mind when you’re marketing on Pinterest and even for designing your website. One of the best things about Pinterest is that it makes discovering new products easy. It doesn’t make you work to find what you didn’t even know you needed (the holy grail of mindsets to sell sell sell).
  6. But it is about search as in SEO. Pinterest links provide more SEO benefit from its links than Flickr’s: the links are not NOFOLLOW-ed! So, Pinterest’s links can convey ranking benefit! You should enjoy the not-yet-NOFOLLOWed status, because it probably won’t be around for long.
  7. Pinterest isn’t a here today, gone tomorrow social media community. There aren’t a lot of brands on Pinterest…yet. It’s only a matter of time though. If you represent a relevant brand who wants to stand out amongst the rest, get there now and refer to #4 above.
  8. It’s social media listening at its purest. Retailers like Nordstrom uses Pinterest “to see what trends and styles the community likes based on engagement – likes and repins…”.

Can you think of any other site usability or marketing takeaways for brand marketers, on or off the platform?

As SiteLab’s Social Media Strategist, I’m really looking forward to launching some exciting campaigns with our clients on Pinterest. If you’re interested in working with us on a Pinterest campaign or a social media marketing strategy, contact me at smm@sitelab.com. Happy Pinning from http://pinterest.com/jbarber5000/!


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