Marketing Kit

Pinterest

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ContentsIntroduction 1

Social Media for Beautiful Things: Pinterest Soars 2

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth 3

Should Marketers Be Pinterested? [Infographic] 6

Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for

Why They Aren’t on Pinterest 7

What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation 9

4 Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention to Pinterest 11

Additional Resources 12

1©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

Introduction

In just one glimpse, a picture speaks to our hearts, minds, and imaginations.

Harnessing our fascination with images, Pinterest, a relatively new social network, allows users to display their favorite pictures and videos for the whole digital world to see and share.

Users create online pinboards on Pinterest and collect images and videos to pin on their boards—much like old-school bulletin boards. Pinterest makes the process easy for users: A “Pin It” button can be added to users’ Web browsers, allowing them to add to their image collections as they traverse the Internet.

Now, businesses are also using Pinterest to tell their stories via pictures and extend their reach. By pinning product images, infographics, how-to information, designs, bits of inspiration, and more, businesses are ap-pealing to our proclivity to look when there’s something to see.

Want to know how you can use Pinterest for your business? Check out the articles in this kit. Among the things you’ll learn:

• Stats about Pinterest’s meteoric rise and what’s driving its growth• Why marketers should care about Pinterest and its users• The top three excuses for not using Pinterest—and why they’re wrong• The top five reasons to use Pinterest as a marketer

You’ll also find links to additional resources, including online seminars, articles, and a panel discussion.

By the time you reach the end of this collection, you’ll have pinned down the reasons for participating in Pinterest—and picked up invaluable how-to advice and tips for making Pinterest part of your marketing mix.

2©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

Social Media for Beautiful Things: Pinterest Soars by By Lenna Garibian, MarketingProfs

Visits to the invitation-only social networking site Pinterest skyrocketed in the second half of 2011, reaching 11.0 million as of December 17, up nearly 40 times the level recorded six months earlier, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

As the name suggests, Pinterest is an online pin board that al-lows you to “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the Web,” according to the company. Such things include images of food, home décor, clothing, and furniture, which users “pin” onto their pages.

The site was recently added to the Top 10 in Hitwise’s Social Networking & Forums category.

Below, other findings from Experian Hitwise.

Site DemographicsNot surprisingly, visitors to the site in the 12 rolling weeks ended December 17 skewed female (58%) and between the age 25 and 44 (59%).

However, Pinterest visitors do have a different geographic profile compared with their counterparts visiting other social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Pinterest and the Social Networking & Forums category both attract the greatest share of their visits from California

and Texas. But the Social Networking category as a whole over-indexes on share of visits from Northeastern states whereas Pinterest over-indexes on visits from the states in the Northwest and Southeast.

Moreover, nine of the top 10 over-indexed states for Pinterest visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category (versus the online population), which is understandable consid-ering the abundance of crafts content on the website.

Celebs, Brands on Pinterest?Pinterest is gaining popularity in the media and among some brands. The site was recently named to Time Magazine’s Top 50 websites of 2011, alongside Google+, Klout, Quora, and Storify, in the social media category.

Although personalities such as Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga don’t appear to have a presence on Pinterest (there is currently a waiting list), Paula Deen does have one, with more than 25,000 followers, 20 bulletin boards (e.g., Game-day Party Pleasers, Paula’s Picks, and Cupcake Cravings), and more than 440 “pins.”

Martha Stewart has more than 11,000 followers on Pinterest, while the department store Nordstom has roughly 6,000 followers.

3©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth by Lenna Garibian, MarketingProfs

Pinterest is arguably the hottest social media site on the Internet—user traffic to the online social catalog has skyrock-eted since mid-2011—but the website also boasts strong audience engagement, retention, and virality among its core demographic, according to a report by RJMetrics.

The following are some of the key findings of the analysis of the data collected by RJMetrics:

• Pinterest is retaining and engaging its users 2-3 times more efficiently, on average, than Twitter was at a similar time in its life cycle.

• “Pins” link to a huge array of websites. For example, Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it accounts for only 3% of pins.

• 80% of pins are “re-pins,” attesting to the viral nature of the Pinterest community. By contrast, at a similar point in Twitter’s life cycle, roughly 1.4% of all tweets were re-tweets, according to a 2009 study by HubSpot.

• The “quality” of the typical new Pinterest user (quality is defined by a user’s level of engagement and likeli-hood to remain active) is high, albeit declining. Users who have joined Pinterest in recent months are 2-3 times less active during their first month than users who joined before them.

Below, detailed findings from the RJMetrics report titled “Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look.”

Pins Connect to a Vast Array of Web SourcesOn Pinterest, every pin (or linked image) ties back to an external link. Among a sample of roughly 1 million pins, more than 100,000 distinct source domains were found.

Among those 100,000 domains, the following chart shows the top 20 sources. The most popular domain was Etsy, which powered just over 3% of pins. Google was a close second,

though almost all Google links point to Google Image Search, which is technically misattributed content from other domains, RJMetrics points out.

Flickr (2.5%), Tumblr (1.1%), and weheartit (1.0%) round out the top 5, after which no domain accounts for more than 1% of pins.

The Viral Nature of Re-PinsThe analysis also broke out the population of pins by how those pins were posted to Pinterest. Remarkably, over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the impressive level of virality at work in the Pinterest community.

4©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth

By contrast, a study conducted by HubSpot at a similar point in Twitter’s history found roughly 1.4% of tweets were retweets.

Surprisingly, a relatively low proportion of pins originate from pinmarklet, a browser bookmarklet that allows users to pin content from any website via one click.

User Engagement: Cohort AnalysisCohort Analysis is a tool that allows marketers to study different groups of users at identical points in time in their lifecycles, regardless of when they actually joined the site.

In the following chart, each line represents a cohort, or a segment of users who made their first pin in a specific month. For example, the June 2011 cohort consists of users who made their first pin in June 2011. The line itself shows the “average cumulative pins made per cohort member.” So, the “Month 1” data-point for the June 2011 cohort shows us how many items were pinned in June 2011 among users who joined in June 2011. The “Month 2” data-point on that same line shows how many pins were made by the typical user in that cohort by the end of July 2011, and so forth.

Among most companies, even highly successful ones, similar cohort analyses show lines that steadily decay toward a more horizontal slope over time, RJMetrics points out. The effect occurs because there is some natural attrition, causing the incremental engagement of the typical user to drop off.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case with Pinterest. Instead, the lines show little to no decay. Their slopes remain consistent, indicating a net attrition rate of close to 0%.

Why no decay in engagement? The reason, according to the study, is possibly one of two factors: (1) no one who starts using Pinterest ever stops; or, more likely (2) users who continue to use Pinterest become so much more engaged over time that their activities fully make up for those users who quit the site.

To explore the issue further, RJMetrics broke out the data on a weekly basis for the eight weeks ended December 18, 2011. The analysis found that between 40% and 60% of unique users were still actively returning back to the site to pin again in each of the first eight weeks of their life cycle. Although that may seem like a steep drop-off, the results are exceptionally strong, particularly for a consumer Internet business, RJMetrics notes. 

5©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth

 

By contrast, when Twitter was at a similar point in its life cycle (late 2009), Twitter’s decay rate was twice that of Pinterest, with user activity (measured by tweets) rapidly plummeting to roughly 20% before stabilizing, according to a 2009 analysis of Twitter by RJMetrics, published by Techcrunch.

Growing Pains: Quality DecayAmong most fast-growing consumer startups, however, an increase in media coverage inevitably drives a big spike in the number of registered users and a drop-off in the quality of the typical user, RJMetrics points out. (Similarly, quality is defined in the study by levels of engagement and likelihood to remain active.)

Pinterest is no exception to that rule. The following chart shows how the typical new user who has joined Pinterest in November and December 2011 is using the site far less than their counterparts from previous months.

The drop is likely caused by flocks of curious onlookers who are outside of Pinterest’s core audience; although registering accounts, they are failing to become engaged.

Growth StatsTo put the RJMetrics research in context, it’s interesting to note Pinterest’s growth trends, particularly over the past six months. The following are some key Pinterest stats, according to separate research from Compete:

• Pinterest attracted 11,140,641 unique visitors to the site on January 20, 2011, up 815% from 1,217,935 visitors six months earlier.

• On a monthly basis, the number of unique visitors to Pinterest grew 54.6% in January over mid-December levels.

• Over the past six months, traffic growth has averaged 63.7% month over month.

• Ranked by numbers of unique visitors, Pinterest was No. 119 in January by Compete, up 87 spots from No. 206 one month earlier.

6©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

Should Marketers Be Pinterested? [Infographic] by Corey O’Loughlin, MarketingProfs

When the time came to consider whether Pinterest was a good fit for the MarketingProfs brand, we had to consider a few factors:

• What goal can it accomplish?• How do we measure success?• Who will manage it?• What added value does it provide over other social

networks?

Because Pinterest is becoming an increasingly important channel for marketers, we though it only right to take a stab at it ourselves:

• Our goal? Branding/awareness of free (“Basic”) MarketingProfs membership.

• Measuring success? All shared links are tracked with Google Analytics to test conversions and referral traffic.

• Who will do it? The great thing about Pinterest is that you can divide the work by assigning contributors, so we chose four team members across the marketing and content teams.

• What’s the added value? We think it allows us a new way to tell our story—how MarketingProfs views and loves marketing—a story that isn’t as easily told elsewhere.

I’ll admit it. It’s been fun, really fun—and we are tracking nicely toward our success metrics.

But like all new things, we have to take a step back and analyze whether this channel is really an effective one for marketers everywhere.

Here’s the good news: Monetate, a company that provides mar-keting agility products and expert optimization resources, has done the digging for us and packaged it nicely in an infograph-ic. Here are my top three takeaways from that infographic:

1. Pinterest is driving more traffic than Google+.2. Pinterest’s unique visitors increased 329% from

September to December 2011.

3. To be successful on Pinterest, you should promote a lifestyle (broadly speaking).

To follow the MarketingProfs boards, click on over to our Pinterest account.

7©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for Why They Aren’t on Pinterest by Jesse Noyes, Eloqua

If you went to your CMO and said, “I want to allocate time to a website that is primarily used by furniture restoration geeks and women designing their dream wedding,” what kind of response would you expect?

Now, if you went to that same CMO and said, “I want to inves-tigate a new social platform that’s driving more referrals than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined,” how do you think that would go over?

The problem is that B2B marketers too often think about Pinterest in terms of the former approach. But that type of reasoning holds B2B marketers back from exploring the most exciting platforms in their early days.

For the uninitiated, Pinterest is the still “invitation-only” social bookmarking site where people can display their interests in a highly visual way. Users “pin” various pages from the Web to their “boards,” which are self-organized by category.

Today, Pinterest is most heavily used for topics such as fashion, furniture, and food. But here are the facts that make Pinterest compelling for B2B marketing:

• Pinterest’s visitor traffic rose to 11 million visits in December, 40 times what it was six months before.

• It accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic in January, on par with Twitter.

• It’s sticky, with users spending an average of 88.3 minutes on the site, ranking behind only Facebook and Tumblr among the top social networks.

You’d think that with trends like that... Pinterest should be mak-ing marketers of all stripes drool. But many aren’t.

Here are three excuses you might hear from B2B marketers for avoiding Pinterest—and why they’re wrong.

1. “It’s not our audience.”

This is perhaps the most common excuse B2B marketers give for skipping out on just about any social platform. It’s the same argument you likely heard about Facebook, or even Twitter, in their early days.

At this point, Pinterest is dominated by links to mid-century lamps and Etsy projects (it skews toward women and the 25-44 age group). But as awareness grows at a rapid clip, people with business interests are going to jump in. (In fact, it’s already happening.) Saying it’s just for knitters is like say-ing Tumblr is just for hipsters. (Check out the MarketingProfs Pinterest account here.)

2. “Pinterest is purely visual.”

B2B marketing is prone to spreadsheets and verbose product spec sheets. So where does our text-heavy marketing fit on Pinterest?

8©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for Why They Aren’t on Pinterest

It doesn’t. But a picture’s worth a thousand slogans. Our con-tent is becoming more aesthetically driven as the competition for attention heats up.

Pinterest is a great way to attract people to your words by highlighting your images. (For a prime example, check out Joe Chernov’s “Infographics” board.)

3. “Pinterest doesn’t have brand pages.”

No, it doesn’t. And that may be the best reason to join.

If history is any indicator, social networks don’t hook a rabid fan base by offering brand pages. As Pinterest grows organically, the time to build your personal brand is now.

Remember: Pinterest is novel, but it isn’t new. It works much like the bookmarking services we know (think StumbleUpon or Reddit)—only more visually enticing. You can pin charts, infographics, slideshows, ebooks, and more. (As an example, I started boards for “Good Content Marketing” and Eloqua’s “Chart of the Week” series.)

By getting involved with the Pinterest community now, you’ll be more likely to become a power user when opportunities like brand pages and ads open up.

9©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation by Chad McCloud, Jabian Consulting

Innovations from businesses are continually changing our world via new products and customer experiences. But anyone who has ever been locked in a brainstorming session knows that the hard part is the process that leads to the innovation.

True innovation is difficult to generate and even harder to repeat. That scarcity of inspiration is what drives companies to look for new and interesting ways to acquire it.

Pinterest, a relatively new social network, provides a refreshing perspective on the pursuit of inspiration. Quickly becoming one of the more addictive sites on the Web, Pinterest is a global bulletin board for images that inspire, trigger laughter, or amuse... because they are just plain cool.

Members can post images of virtually anything, categorize them for easy reference, and create their own pinboards that contain other images of interest to them. Some of us have “lost” loved ones to Facebook or reality TV; it’s a good bet that within the next year you will “lose” a loved one to Pinterest.

People use Pinterest for more reasons that I can fathom, but what struck me instantly was the spirit of innovation within the posted images. Some images show a creative combination of concepts that aren’t typically associated with one another. For example, this image merges a staircase and a bookshelf by turning each step into a shelf of books.

The collection of such images, when viewed together on a page, starts to form a neural network of interconnected and inspira-tional ideas.

Three Innovation LessonsSo, what can your business learn from Pinterest? Here are three key lessons about innovating that businesses can bor-row from Pinterest.

1. Make innovation a visual experience.

Traditional brainstorming sessions use whiteboards to capture ideas with words, but the use of images and videos brings something much more sensory.

For example, a product manager for a software company might view a visually appealing trend graphic from Mint.com and find an applicable enhancement to her own product—via a much more interesting medium than a verbal description of enhanced reporting.

2. Participation breeds innovation.

As Thomas Edison quipped, “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.” When more than 4 million people use Pinterest to post ideas, you’re bound to find some pretty amazing doses of inspiration. The site makes it uncommonly easy for millions of members to pin, search, and browse through volumes of content quickly.

Just think about what could be possible if businesses were to expand innovation efforts across the entire company, or even to customers.

3. Quick! Innovate in the next 10 minutes!

Many of us have a hard time innovating when our time for innovation is locked in a schedule between 9 AM and 10 AM on Tuesday. If your best ideas come while using the treadmill, showering, or enjoying a cup of coffee on Saturday morning, then a place to post ideas allows innovation to occur beyond calendar and time constraints. Pinterest does that exceed-ingly well.

Expanding the number of ideas, however, will take businesses only so far. Companies that are famous for innovation use structured approaches to channel their inspirations into new products and experiences that generate real revenue.

10©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation

Structure for Maximum Impact

Here are three structural steps that can maximize the impact of those three lessons Pinterest teaches us.

1. Start with a goal.

Pinterest members use the site for everything from collecting and expressing their own styles to finding sources of good ideas. Business innovation works only when a defined goal is combined with facilitation toward that goal. Examples of goals include generating new product ideas and enhancing current ones, or creating different ways to search, catalog, and connect.

2. Inspire innovation by building upon the ‘known.’

Most people have a hard time generating inspiring ideas out of thin air. When presented with a tangible idea, however, many of us can build upon that idea and take it a few steps further... or in a new direction entirely.

Connections are made when you associate two ideas that seemingly don’t have anything to do with each other. Thermostats and iPods perform completely separate functions, but when brought together they help inspire products such as the Nest self-programming home thermostat.

3. Encourage collaboration on top of affirmation

Many of the comments on Pinterest are affirmative (e.g., “I like it!”). Though positive feedback encourages participation, encouraging collaboration among the innovators can iteratively lead to improvisational (yet critical) steps toward a break-through idea.

Facilitators who draw out and link ideas via contiguity and con-trast help focus the chaos of creativity into applied solutions.

As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.”

* * *Companies that infuse some of the lessons from Pinterest into their own innovation efforts are bound to find ideas that they never dreamed possible. At the very least, they’ll walk away with new visions for remodeling the kitchen.

11©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

4 Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention to Pinterest by Corey O’Loughlin, MarketingProfs

Let’s not beat around the bush, by now you’ve heard of Pinterest and are wondering if it’s worth your time and effort to start yet another social presence. While it probably isn’t right for all brands, here are four things you should know about Pinterest:

1. Pinterest is driving serious referral traffic.

Pinterest’s popularity is soaring and as a result, Pinterest users are driving serious traffic to websites. According to data from late January 2012, Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. Take a minute to digest that. Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Combined! That’s a lot of referral traffic and figures like that shouldn’t be ignored.

2. Pinterest users are highly engaged.

Pinterest’s user base has grown exponentially and traffic to the site has increased 40x in the last six months. There are more than 10.4 million registered users, and the Pinterest traffic graphs look like the mythical growth charts you see in clip art. Potential users can remain on a waitlist for over a week to be admitted to the site and are clamoring to get in. Not only are users banging at the gates, once they are in, they are spend-ing an average of 98 minutes per month on the site and daily use of the site increased more than 145% since the start of 2012. Pinterest is growing at a rapid rate and attracting a very engaged user base.

3. Pinterest can be good for your SEO.

Pinterest is a massive social network with great domain author-ity. It is indexed frequently by search engines and there are SEO opportunities in how you name and describe your Boards. You can (and should) create descriptions of your Boards and of the content you pin in alignment with your keyword strategy (don’t name boards “Great Stuff” or “Things I Like” or forget to add a description with SEO value). There are great backlink possibili-ties too—the easier you make it for people to pin your content, the better.

4. Pinterest can help humanize your brand.

To most of your clients and prospects, your company is a thing, a logo, a service—Pinterest gives you the chance to human-ize your brand through Boards that reflect your culture, your employees, and your values. Sure, you can humanize your brand in other places, like your Facebook page or on Twitter, but Pinterest lends you the unique opportunity to display the “WHO” of your company right next to the “WHAT.” Is your brand committed to giving back to charity? Pin blog posts about your work using a great picture. Are your employees part of an inter-mural sports team or athletic league? Start a Board chronicling their athletic prowess. Does your office welcome furry friends? Pin those puppies right up, you can humanize with animals too!

Is Pinterest right for your brand? Pinterest, like all social media sites, is just a means to an end—you need to look at what you are trying to achieve with your marketing programs before you can determine if Pinterest is an appropriate tool for you. In 2012, the demographics of Pinterest users and their pinning habits and interests may change. So even if you determine that Pinterest isn’t right for you now—keep an eye on it, it may be right later.

12©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.

Additional Resources

Panel Discussion: The Rise of Pinterest in B2BPost: http://www.focus.com/roundtables/rise-pinterest-b2b/Audio file: https://www.hidefcorporate.com/wav/rec/30/conf50230_11379910.mp3

Online Seminar: The Rising Power of Visual Content on Social Networks (March 12, 2012)http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/482

Online Seminar: How to Select Images That Make Your Marketing More Effective (a Take 10 webcast)http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/400

How-To Article: How to Evolve Your B2B Customer Experience Using Imageshttp://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2011/5435/how-to-evolve-your-b2b-customer-experience-using-images

Short Article: How to Choose Stock Images for Your Email Campaignshttp://www.marketingprofs.com/short-articles/2491/how-to-choose-stock-images-for-your-email-campaigns

Slide Show: Top 12 Overused Stock Photoshttp://www.marketingprofs.com/pics/2011/5542/top-12-overused-stock-photos-slide-show