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| Pinterest For Business (Photo credit: Kris Olin) |
Pinterest and the role of Pinterest in small and medium business
Let’s look at focusing on a popular social sharing site- Pinterest, and understand more into the social sharing phenomenon. A study released last month showed that average time visitors spent on social networking sites per month, could range from 6.75 hours on Facebook, 1.5 hours on Tumblr, 1.5 hours on Pinterest, 21 minutes on Twitter, 17 minutes on LinkedIn, and 3 minutes on Google Plus.
Consumer Proposition:
Pinterest engages with consumers through helping engage through the visual medium- they get to search websites that keep products they love, books they follow, recipes they eat, or the favorite holiday gifts that they want to send across to their loved ones. It is interesting to discover unique toys from Hamleys, Lego, or a new product idea shared in it’s initial stages.
December was a fabulous month. The social sharing website was encouraging Pinspiration = It gives an opportunity for consumers to share every weekday a broad theme. It is basically repinning across a wide range of categories – from animals, art, architecture, cars, celebrities, design, Hair and Beauty, Health and Fitness, Humor, Illustration and Posters.
Great recipes, beautiful decorations, cooking experience, house utilities, images of Lego toys, visuals of the last purchase, or following the favorite e-retailer via the medium.
The best way to build the community is by getting to know the pinners that follow. It is a simple way of checking their product boards, and evaluating the visuals they like. The sharing, and exchange on the community makes it a great place to do market testing. Any product idea could be evaluated through visuals on the website, and there could be traffic checked on the account that is Pinterest for business. The easy way of getting traffic is to make people aware of the story, and the products you endorse. Those could be interesting designs of Chanel Bag, a new food recipe, a home that is up for sale, or beautiful new toys of Hamley’s that have hit the Christmas market.
1. Emotions sell better than statistics. The idea of social sharing medium is to build community wherein consumers could follow fabulous products, and then leverage the designs to get inspired, and generate traffic
2. Visuals on Pinterest start with a vivid picture of the experience- followed by the repin button that helps consumers classify information
3. They tend to take consumers on a journey that allows people to focus on features, and not push those features, logo, and design out of context.
4. It is a virtual college book, or a diary wherein the most memorable ideas get saved. This feature helps consumers to come back and refresh their memory.
Here's how Pinterest gained credibility:
Authority: It is highly recommended for marketers purely for it establishes authority. It looks at the popular boards, and the standards that the website has established.
Borrow Ideas: It encourages borrowing ideas for inspiration. 1 out of 5 times consumers would like to look at a popular pinterest board, and format their descriptions, sharing that they don’t reinvent the wheel.
Avoid Cliches: A good décor at home would be more than someone writing about a beautiful picture- It could be more about descriptions. Descriptions mostly get copied, and so it is best to let the product speak for itself.
So this is the new audience- the curious consumers, who browse Pinterest, check new websites, follow new product designs, and are engaged in filtering through websites to understand creative industries, and the designs that could gain audience, and social liking.
What is happening to the curious consumer time span?
The consumer loved to spend 71 hours on TV offline in 2006, and now they spend 58 hours. Yes the extra hours that are saved from not watching Hulu, Netflix have gone into browsing internet and engaging in community activities.
How do people browse?
1. 10 out of 100 people watch TV and access web associated with the network they are watching. It could be following NBC, and logging on to www.nbc.com to check updates, or extended version of the show.
2. 29 out of 100 people watch TV and use Facebook, LinkedIn, and others such as Pinterest (or one of the social sites) concurrently
3. 61 out of 100 watch TV and use internet concurrently
Pinterest for Business: Few of the experts mention that putting in a mix of content- visuals, cultural content, business features, goes a long way in engaging users. For businesses, Pinterest can be a way of curation of content like infographics, video, company culture, and even blog posts. Pinterest pages can also be used as a landing page for a campaign, and event. The boards provide a unique way of ORGANIZING information.
Companies that sell $ 100 K consulting packages need to have Pinterest in their marketing plans: Should they? The compelling reasons are quite a few:
SEO- While there are many theories about how the big search engines score on social media linking, connecting Pinterest can certainly help others.
Design- Are you a design forward company? Handbags, and Apparel get a lot of traction through this medium. Graphic designers are a most prolific group of pinners, and they could in the company get to do this activity.
Marketing- The marketing teams can start a company board, and start pinning the campaigns that inspire them. Pinterests search is mainly through which people can find what the marketing teams are doing, and this in addition to relevant SEO can inspire one too many.
The step-to-step guide on what can be done to build the community:
Stage 1: It starts with adding attractive content that can be easily found.
The brand trials can be improved by adding a pin it button. As soon as the marketing manager of Allrecipes added the button she got a referral traffic from a lot many more places. There were more consumers that were coming on Pinterest website, and they started contributing on the website. Entrepreneurs and independent cooks started sharing their attractive recipes, with an incentive of getting found through this website. “Since we added the Pin It button to our site, we’ve seen a significant increase in the volume of recipes and videos shared daily– resulting in dramatic boosts in the daily social referrals Allrecipes receives from Pinterest. This makes our content more discoverable, which grows our community.”
There was 900 percent increase in traffic within 3 months. After the Pin it Button was installed, 50000 recipes were pinned resulting in 139 million Pinterest impressions, and clicks on All Recipes Pinterest community.
Stage 2: After referral traffic is improved, it helps to use email marketing to drive pins.
Referral traffic is improved by adding the Pin It button. What happens next is that AllRecipe community members use email marketing to share the food inspiration. To make the sharing process easy, Pinterest members were sent a follow up email. Approximately 6 million users were sent the outreach. The email features included popular pins, and re-pins that encouraged consumers to click on the email.
Stage 3: Increase Engagement: Pinterest traffic led to more engagement. In less than a week after an email newsletter was released there was a dramatic effect on engagement. Here’s how the traffic increased: the traffic increase by Pinterest was 4x, the re-pins increased 3x, and the reach increased 2x as a result of the feature. A Pin It Button could help engage traffic, and go a long way in a higher referral traffic, better engagement, and adding attractive content.
The best part about Pinterest- It rewards fresh content (like any other social sites), but the content need to be visually attractive. It is a good B2B Marketing tool, and it would make a lot of sense to fill up the company board with good content, visual blogs, company cultural informaion, and digital information- aspects that spell engagement, referral traffic, and higher clickthroughs.
