By Nick Bowditch
If you’ve heard me speak recently, you’ll remember that I bang on about Pinterest a fair bit.
It’s the virtual pinboard for people to share images and videos that’s the biggest mover and shaker in the social media world at the moment.
And the best thing about Pinterest in marketing is that it changes the focus for your customers from “look at me” to “look at this” which makes them feel more at ease with your business and less threatened or likely to be turned off.
How big is Pinterest?
* It’s big: Pinterest reached 10 million US monthly unique visitors faster than any independent site in history.
* There are around 2.2 million unique visitors to the site every day.
* It’s a great traffic tool: Pinterest now generates more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Google + and Linkedin combined!
* It’s not going anywhere: 3 out of 4 Pinterest users expect to use Pinterest for the foreseeable future.
* It’s great for retailers – 12% of people have pinned something that they later bought online.
* It’s addictive: the average timem spent browsing Pinterest is 89 minutes.
* And it’s growing: every day there are 160% more people using Pinterest than the day before.
Pretty amazing.
But the most important stat about Pinterest for me is that the site’s users are around 80-90% female, plus more than 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook Fans are female. So, with your market being very heavily influenced by the female consumer, this should be interesting to you.
What are people doing on Pinterest?
Different people use Pinterest in different ways:
- Expressing themselves through pictures and images relevant to their lives.
- Reminding themselves of things they want to do, buy or revisit.
- Sharing or recommending things that they think others should know about.
- Learning about and exploring specific or random topics.
- Searching for and discovering new or specific things to do, buy, look at or read.
And all of them are acting as members of an online word-of-mouth marketing team that’s directing buyers, doers and seekers to your online and mobile properties.
How are brands making money using Pinterest?
The way Pinterest works is about finding inspiration through the people you follow. Therefore, the most successful brands on Pinterest are the ones who are less promotional and more human, ie using the network as if they were individual users.
They pin things that communicate who the brands are and what they are inspired by.
They post images of products, tag a price on that product and let users find them easily.
They bring value by showing images and videos of fun and unique ways for people to use their products. Or show a completely different use of a product than what you might expect.
And they link their Pinterest through to their blog, website, Facebook Page or online store making it seamless for a fan to like something they pin, read more about it, and buy it.
What Aussie brands are getting Pinterest right?
One of the best examples is our own Tourism Australia. Their Pinterest page is much like a scrapbook of all things cool and great about Australia. They have 35 boards with 1105 things pinned on them and have amassed 1076 followers. Check out their Pinterest page here: http://pinterest.com/seeaustralia .
Another Aussie brand, Kikki.K, has also had great success early on using Pinterest, primarily because of a synergy their own retail stores and ideas have with the network. Kristina Karlsson, the founder of Kikki.K, says, “Pinterest is very much aligned with our brand values, in that we’re both passionate about helping organise ideas and inspiration in style. We saw that users were already pinning Kikki.K products to their boards, so we knew it was the perfect time to join the Pinterest community through our own profile.”
My tips for smashing it on Pinterest?
1. Create boards that help you tell your story to the audiences you want to tell it to.
2. If you can, hire a photographer and/or a great graphic designer or use one of our ClooeeVirtual designers from just $8 per hour.
3. Pair every product, page or important piece of content you want to draw attention to with a great image.
4. Add a Pinterest share tab to your great images.
5. Add ‘Pin It’ badges and widgets to your blog or website.
6. Add a special Pinterest tab to your Facebook Page or ask me how to do it.
7. Test, target and segment your website content based on what you learn (you knew I’d say something about testing right?)
8. Encourage engagement and pinning activity by allowing others to post their pins to your profile.
9. Use the actual layout of the boards to tell your story eg http://bit.ly/MDEo2a
10. Do something different. eg http://bit.ly/L8xnKQ
11. Use Pinterest to raise awareness or money: eg http://bit.ly/L8sEbY
12. Use Pinterest in a competition or promotion eg http://bit.ly/MDEtTC
13. Link your Pinterest pins to your online store – make it seamless and easy for people to buy something of yours that they like the look of.
14. Outsource it. Did you know we actually manage Pinterest for small and medium-sized businesses? Let me know if you are interested in us building a huge profile on Pinterest for your business.
So are you addicted to Pinterest yet? What about tips would you like to share with the Connect2Mums crew that I have missed?
You can follow Connect2mums at pinterest here www.pinterest.com/peacemitchell
This article was written by Nick Bowditch of Clooee
Nick Bowditch is a Social Futurist. He is also one of Australia’s online success stories. Basically broke and with his young family expanding quickly, Nick took one of the bravest – and best – decisions of his life and chucked in his city job to start his own travel business, working from home. He built up that business from a customer database of just 4 when he started to more than 22,000 just 3 years later – all without staff, a shop front, and without any mainstream advertising in print, radio or television – instead opting to promote his new business using Social Media Marketing.
In the last 3 years, he has now gone from having that one online business to three, his e-books and electronic products have been downloaded thousands of times, and he is now a sought-after keynote speaker, MC for conferences, professional blogger and author. He has recently launched his fourth business, Clooee, which specialises in the creation of mobile applications, better customer engagement through mobile marketing and the exciting world of Augmented Reality
Nick is the Social Media expert for the AusMumpreneur Network and Conferences he is next presenting at the Melbourne AusMumpreneur Conference on 2nd July
Hi Nick,
I recently have joined Pinerly which is in BETA stage. It allows you to set up campaigns on Pinterest and then be able to track with Pinalytics how each pin performs. I think this is going to be a very useful tool. Any thoughts on it?