The Next Big Thing What Is Pinterest Marketing Essay

The Next Big Thing What Is Pinterest Marketing Essay Pinterest is a website that lets individuals or businesses gather and share the numerous interesting items, pictures, videos, or anything that interests them; It is essentially a community of curators (Pinterest, 2012, p.1). The term pin refers to posting or placing an item on your pinboard (Pinterest, 2012, p.1). Individuals use pinboards to beautify their households/offices, design their weddings, learn about new recipes, and other interesting things (Pinterest, 2012, p.1). The website allows users to browse through other pinboards of individuals or brands; browsing through pinboards is an exciting way to discover new ideas (Pinterest, 2012, p.2). Pinterest users are encouraged to interact with the content by repining it, sharing pins on Facebook and Twitter or via email, and even embedding individual pins on their website or blog (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 9). . 1.1 Brief History of Pinterest Pinterest was created by a company called Cold Brew Labs in 2009 (Carlson, 2012, pg. 1). Cold Brew Labs initially consisted of three founders, but a couple of months later it consisted of only Ben Silberman and Paul Sciarra (Carlson, 2012, pg. 1). It has since grown to become one the best and most used social media platform. As of Fall 2012, Pinterest had over 11 million users, of which up to 80% of the users are women between the ages of 25 and 55 (Hayden, 2012, p.1). According to Beth Hayden (2012), the demographic is shifting and there are more men joining Pinterest, she also goes on to talk about how Pinterest users are fairly affluent, with an average salary of $50,000. 1.2 SWOT Analysis of Pinterest The major strengths of Pinterest are its users, its fun and easy interface, its ability to increase traffic, ability to increase sales, and its abilty to link and lead (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 9-12). The major weaknesses of Pinterest are spams, the fact that it is not on all smartphones, and also the fact that they are yet to develop a clear, effective revenue mode (Hubspot, 2012). Opportunities available for Pinterest are take over/mergers, more mobile apps, and. Threats are clone sites, biggers sites like google, facebook (Hubspot, 2012). 2. How Are They Influencing Social Media? 3-5 years ago an average online customer would have to ask friends or professional for wedding tips, home dà ©cor tips, or even food tips. Today, Pinterest is changing the way we access information, we no longer need to pay a professional for wedding tips, home dà ©cor tips, etc. However, the main question is how does that influence social media? Well, Pinterest has filled the void social media giants Facebook and Twitter have failed to fill by providing consumers and sellers the perfect medium to exchange ideas visually. At present, Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube combined, the only social media platform driving more traffic than Pinterest is Facebook (Hayden, 2012, p.11) Pinterest, whose users have been proven to buy more items, spend more money, and complete more transactions online than any other site (Crum, 2012, p. 2). In short, the people who use Pinterest are the ones at the heart of every social media outlet on the market these days, and what theyre looking at and buying is critical to any successful merchant (Crum, 2012, p. 2). 3. How Can Businesses Effectively Use Pinterest Pinterest presents businesses with a variety of activities you can initiate to market your company to a new audience (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 22). The goal is to increase or attain brand recognition, drive traffic to your website and be successful at transferring the new visits into leads and/or sales (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 22) Pinterest is an awesome social media platform for businesses that rely on high-volume of website traffic to increase sales. In fact, early research indicates that Pinterest is more effective at driving traffic compared to other social media sites, even Facebook (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 10). At the end of the day, whats going to matter most is how much traffic, leads, sales, and customers you generate via Pinterest (Hubspot, 2012, pg.27). What is the behaviour of traffic? What topic drives traffic? Analytics tools like Pin Alert, Pinerly, and Pinvolve can help a business monitor and measure growth (Honigman, 2012, p.1). 3.1 How To Drive Website Traffic and/or Sales Via Pinterest First of all, the business has to realize that it has to gain followers, and the easiest way to do this is by becoming an information curator for your niche (Hayden, 2012, p.1). Gather the newest and best resources on your boards. Become a trusted source of information on Pinterest, and your following will grow by leaps and bounds (Hayden, 2012, p.1). Also, Connect your account with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Not only will it help you gain followers, but making this connection adds social media icons under your profile picture that link to your Facebook and Twitter profiles (Hayden, 2012, p.1). A lot of brands have already started creating contests using Pinterest. Hold a contest that asks users to create a pinboard on their own account to demonstrate what they love about your brand, products, or services (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 25) Make it super easy for website visitors to share your visual content or images on Pinterest by adding a Pin It button to your site (Hayden, 2012, p.1). Just like other social media sharing buttons, this will help to expose your brand to a new audience (Hayden, 2012, p.1). Offer exclusive Pinterest promotions. Create pins that give special promotions for following you on Pinterest (Hayden, 2012, p.1). Create a board that tells the story of your company and communicates your core values. Make this board available to people as part of your sales process (Hayden, 2012, p.1). 4. Brands Already On Pinterest Pinterest offers a great medium to connect with your audience. The brands that have been most successful arent just enabling users to pin their content; rather, theyre getting in on the pinning themselves (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 34) Unlike Twitter, The top profiles, owned by individuals, on Pinterest are over 10 times larger than the top profiles owned by companies, and none are celebrity accounts (business insider, 2012). Individuals who have been successful have kept it simple: Lots of pictures of food and fashion (Minato, 2012, p.2) Pinterest offers a great medium to connect with your audience. The brands that have been most successful arent just enabling users to pin their content; rather, theyre getting in on the pinning themselves. (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 34) Below are 5 brands that are doing well: Perfect Pallete Drake University Mashable Wall Street Journal Whole Foods Market 4.1 What are they doing right? While Pinterest is still very young and its true ROI remains to be seen, here are three examples of brands who are already using Pinterest the right way: to engage fans in a meaningful way that gets them to react, share, and even convert (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 34) The Perfect Palette, a wedding blog that explores the color palette possibilities for your wedding and serves, as a resource for other wedding ideas, would seem to be a perfect match for Pinterest and it is (Wasserman, 2012, p.1). Drake University for instance uses Pinterest to interact with students and help them navigate campus life, they also showcases items its student population might actually be interested in: clothing that matches the schools colors, room dà ©cor perfect for the dorm, guides to making cheap food look and taste awesome, and study inspirations (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 39). If you are a potential student, you can learn everything you need to know about the school with just a few quick glances (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 34) Meanwhile, since Pinterest looks a bit like a newspaper, the Wall Street Journal made it into an actual newspaper. The newspaper takes the most interesting quotes from its articles, highlights them on its Quotes Board and then encourages users to click on them (Minato, 2012, p.1). Food is one of the major niches or shared interests on Pinterest. In fact, food lovers were among the first on Pinterest; they saw the benefits of pinning instead of clipping recipes. These foodies used boards to plan dinner parties, collect holiday baking ideas, and create their own virtual cookbooks (Helm, 2012, p.4). 5. Conclusion As you can tell, the trick to succeeding on Pinterest isnt necessarily about showing off your products or services directly. Its about finding creative ways to show how those products and services fit into the lifestyles of your target audience (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 43). Take the best practices we have shared here and start pinning content that represents your company identity and attracts visitors back to your website (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 43). Finally, dont invest a ton of effort in marketing on Pinterest unless you can measure the results of your activities (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 43). Be smart about the way you prioritize your marketing initiatives and keep a close eye on the specific benefits this new social network can provide to your business (Hubspot, 2012, pg. 43). At the end, it comes down to this: make an amazing product, and people will buy it (Patterson, 2011, p.1)