If you’re the person in charge of social media at your company, Pinterest may cause you to groan and look for excuses to opt out of maintaining yet another communication channel. Unfortunately Pinterest is increasingly looking like a medium marketers shouldn’t ignore; fortunately, it also looks like a medium that delivers significant ROI, and might not require the level of investment required by Facebook or a blog.
A Medium Marketers Can’t Ignore: In 3 Charts
1) Pinterest is a $7.7 Billion Company, and “appeals to college-educated females between the ages of 25 to 44. A sweet demographic known for its spending decisions and habits.”
2) From Q2 2011 to now, Pinterest has grown from representing 1.2% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites to 17.4%, and it generates greater revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter.
3) Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+, and its share of total social media referrals is growing.
OK. So I can’t ignore it. What’s it going to cost me?
TIME 91% of marketers report using social media, and over half of these are spending 6+ hours a week doing it. A good blog post requires a lot of research because it contains a lot of content, and both Facebook and Twitter involve conversations with consumers that need to be monitored. Pinterest, however, is sometimes described as the next phase in social media – content is not (time consumingly) generated, but curated – “Pinterest offers a new level of fun and interaction for our customers as they work with us to create and curate content.” Because you are using content you already have, content created by others, and your followers are adding to and refining your content, Pinterest lessens the burden of time investment required by other social media platforms.
MONEY The chart below is one I created by compiling statistics from several sources, and averaging over the ranges given by various sources. For example, one company is selling Repins for $0.75, one blogger devised an algorithm to calculate the value of a repin, and Twitter and Facebook statistics were found elsewhere. Any of these stats are highly contested, industry-specific, and involve huge ranges, but the take home is that Pinterest is relatively cheap and appears to generate a healthy return on the investment.
So how do I do it?
It’s profitable and efficient, so how can you optimize your Pinterest board to increase brand/ product awareness and traffic to your site? Neocloudmarketing reiterates the standard adage for all content creation: show your consumer the “whole package” – how your product is used, the lifestyle and how it intersects with other brands and products on the market – ie, give content that goes beyond your product and is useful to your consumers. Social Media Examiner recommends researching how your followers are interacting with your board – which pins are they re-pinning, what information can you get about your followers’ interests by looking at what they pin on their own boards? There are also resources for creating the images that will entice users.
The great thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need several paragraphs – just a picture.
