Pinterest Marketing

Curalate has just come out of private beta with a new offering for brands that allows them to manage their presence more easily on Pinterest through advanced analytics. They are coming with a fresh approach that combines measurement of both the brand’s activities as well as the activity of fans (first and third party actions), giving a more complete view of how a brand is being perceived on a social platform.

While Facebook and Twitter are just about equal in terms of female to male ratio, Pinterest has an overwhelming female audience (80+%).

Are you wondering how Pinterest could help your business?

Pinterest is one of the hottest social media sites at the moment. Pinterest was the fastest stand alone site ever to reach 10 million monthly unique visitors.

Is Pinterest just a passing fad? Readers respond to the May Gloves Off question.

Jeff Bodzewski, director of social strategy at Aspen Marketing Services, says the question is a larger one as it indicates a shift from the proverbial “soundbite culture” to one now driven by a preference for a singular image.

The explosion of Pinterest, Instagram and Reddit demonstrates how an increasing number of people — our target of course as marketers — prefer the first piece of new information to be an image, until they take the action to learn more by reading. Even a superficial review of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter posts will show consumer engagement is notably higher around images than text-based updates.

With the launch of its official Pinterest page less than a week ago and a new social-media campaign targeting Pinterest users, Honda is one of a few auto brands to make a big marketing push on the platform. "It's such a fast-growing social-media network and seemed like a really good, different, creative outlet for us and a chance to use a visual medium to promote our cars," Lauren Ebner, assistant manager of social media at American Honda Motor Co., told Ad Age. Honda "wanted to have the opportunity to put images of our cars on there ... as a way to drive people back to our website," Ms. Ebner added. "Most of our images link back to Honda.com, and [users] can find out more about the car that way."

Following Pinterest’s new design, we’ve discovered an exciting new way to “hack” your boards.

Inspired by our previous Pinterest board hack, Eugene Chen of Vitamin Creativity made an incredibly easy tool, designed specifically to splice up images for the new Pinterest design.

Think back six months. You probably never had heard of a little website called Pinterest.

Now it's the third most-visited social-networking site in the United States, according to a report released Thursday by Experian Marketing Services, a digital marketing firm.

Pinterest, which lets its users "pin" photos and info from the Internet onto virtual boards, ranks behind only Facebook and Twitter in terms of total visitors, according to the analysis, titled "The 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report."

It's a question that's burning through the minds of many marketers — and that's why we're asking our readers to vent some steam and weigh in.

Read what our experts had to say and then share your opinions below by Wed., April 11. The best answers will be printed in our May issue in a special Reader Response section. Don't forget to include your full name and title along with your comment.

If your brand isn’t on Pinterest, you could be missing out on a growing stream of potential customers. While shaping your brand’s image on Pinterest, remember to take into account the specifics of the site’s userbase. A recent study showed that home, arts and crafts, style/fashion and food are the most popular categories on Pinterest. The food category is the fastest growing segment of Pinterest. SEE ALSO: Pinterest’s First Investor Explains the Secret to the Startup’s SuccessEven if your brand doesn’t directly specialize in these topics, there may be a way to include them in your brand’s boards to gain maximum exposure. It’s also important to remember that while Pinterest’s audience is heavily female, the demographics of the site are changing.

It’s hard to ignore Pinterest‘s explosive growth over the past year. In a very short period of time, the social network has gone from relative obscurity to a top 100 site, with 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors.

But how many referrals does Pinterest generate? Are those visits valuable? Do they convert? Are they engaged? How many people use the “pin it” button on a site? Which pictures on a site are the most pinned and repinned?

This infographic breaks down the demographics (education level, income, age and gender) of users on top social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.

Some sites’ users are more demographically alike than others. One thing is the same for most social sites — college students, or those who have completed some college, represent the majority on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg and Reddit. Among Facebook users, 57% have completed some college, and 24% have earned a bachelor’s or master’s degree.

See more interesting demographic data.

Pinterest is planning to release redesigned profiles this week, according to CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann.

“I’m so excited about it,” said Silbermann (pictured, left), who spoke at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday. “We wanted to make it more beautiful … to make your profile different in kind than the profile you have on Facebook.”

Silbermann emphasized new discoverability features in the redesign, saying he and his team wanted to make it easier for users to stumble upon other like-minded users, and highlight the people their connections are repinning images from.

He also said the team is working on expanding the number of things users can pin, including video. Soon, people will be able to pin from Vimeo, Hulu and Netflix, among others. And, as was revealed earlier this week,an iPad app — as well as a public API — are also in the works.

IKEA, the Swedish-based home furnishings retailer that operates about 38 stores in the U.S., launched a YouTube channel called “How to Build,” the latest in a series of new content marketing initiatives introduced by the company’s IKEAUSA division over the past year. The channel currently has eight playlists with videos produced by the company on topics that include design tips, “How to” videos on putting together some of their well-known furniture pieces, and style ideas for various rooms, including kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms. One playlist also is home to all of IKEA’s ads.

Are you wondering how your business could use Pinterest?

To say there’s been a lot of buzz about Pinterest in recent months would be putting it mildly!

Here are a few ways to use Pinterest to boost your search ranking.

In case you’ve been living in a mountain cave in Bhutan for the past couple of months, Pinterest is a relatively new social networking site that allows users to create online image collages, then quickly and easily share those collages — called “pinboards” — with other Pinterest users.

It’s fun, easy, and catching on like wildfire right now.

Part of Pinterest’s appeal is that it’s beautiful. Enter the lovely world of Pinterest, and all the troubles of your day-to-day life just seem to slip away in a stream of perfect little black dresses, baby otters, and cherubic children who never seem to get dirty or mouth off to their parents.

We have a fresh niche social site to talk about, and its making a huge splash. Last week, we saw reports that Pinterest has hit 10 million unique monthly U.S. visits. Reports for the week of January 16, 2012 monitored the site traffic as high as 17 million unique monthly U.S. visits. It’s addicting, it’s social, and it’s driving tons of site traffic. So what is Pinterest? The millions of people using and visiting Pinterest everyday are there to do one of two things: users can share their favorite things, people, thoughts, or ideas from all over the web on virtual “boards”; and a person can monitor their board’s activity or “repin” from the people or brands that they follow. Thanks to a beautiful, constantly refreshing interface, each visit to Pinterest can be equally memorable as it is unique.

As Pinterest enjoys a surge in popularity, MyCustomer takes a look at its value to business – and whether it could prove to be another significant social platform to engage with customers. 

Everyone's talking about Pinterest - the new virtual pinboard site that is being blogged as one of the hottest social services right now. According to Compete, the number of Pinterest’s unique visitors increased by 429% from September to December 2011 to reach 7.21m users and research by Shareaholic indicated the site has overtaken Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn for site referrals, generating 3.6% of referred traffic from January.

Do you feel like you woke up a week ago and Pinterest had taken over the world?  I read on Twitter (so it is true, of course) that Pinterest is now bigger than Google, will be running for President of the United States, and is recording an album of Justin Bieber cover songs.

The meteoric success of Pinterest has shocked everyone.

Except me.

I have it all figured out. You see, Pinterest makes perfect sense if you just look at the natural evolution of social media …

Guest Post by {grow} community member Lauren Schaefer She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog (thesmallthingsblog.com) exactly one year ago. And like most of us, it was a labor of love without a whole lot of “community.” In fact, for the first eight months, she had a grand total of seven readers. But between August of 2011 and today Kate has had over 10 million page views! How did she achieve this amazing success in just five months? Pinterest!

Pinterest has made a big splash on the social media scene, by quickly earning passionate users who log multiple hours per day on the site. Pinterest saw a 4,000% increase in site traffic from June to December of last year, and many consumer-facing and female-centric brands are already using it well. While Nordstrom pins its latest shoes and fashions by boards organized by department, Whole Foods uses the site to pin kitchen design inspiration and recycling projects in addition to recipes using its foods.

But despite its reputation as a service for brides and decorators, only 58% of the visitors to the site are women. And just like its diversity in users, brands on Pinterest aren’t limited to department and grocery stores. News sites such as Mashable and Time Magazine are also using the site to spread cover art, articles and copy included in its news stories.

Pinterest, the website which lets people collect and share photos online with a “virtual pinboard,” has steadily amassed a very dedicated following of users that spreads far beyond the app-obsessed early adopter crowd. On Tuesday, a new study out of content sharing company Shareaholic showed just how powerful the Palo Alto, California-based startup has become. Shareaholic's survey (click to enlarge) Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

Making websites is pretty easy. You buy a domain. Pick a template on WordPress or any CMS platform of your choice. Throw some content and images. Get it live and SEO’d. 

Making it social-friendly is another story. 

As the world becomes more social every day, you have to make your site more open and mobile. The salesman approach to social platforms and eCommerce websites is passe already. Users nowadays look closely if it has a dash of social to it, which means you need to use a personal approach to turn a user into a customer. We all know that almost every company is already on Facebook and Twitter, but if you’re a start-up, how do you make users flock to your landing page and increase sign-ups? The success of a social platform doesn’t lie on the number of sign-ups but how many people are using it. Pinterest, Instagram, and Codecademy have done it right. Can you? 

Here are 5 tips on how to make your websites more social-friendly: