Pinterest, a relatively new social media platform, has become a buzzing haven for consumers where they exhibit their preferences and likes for products. This has lead to marketers giving more attention to the site to reach their target audience which currently complement their social media activities.
In Nov
14, 2012 Pinterest launched its site to businesses and corporates could launch themselves as a brand and participate under their corporate name. Here is a screenshot of pinterest.
How do I Create your Brand Presence through Pinterest?
Pinterest offers benefits to businesses with its new features and tools.
- Website verification can be done officially so that the account is viewed as genuine
- A number of widgets and buttons are included for increased engagement with the Pinterest users
- The section called resources contains guides, case studies, terms of service for the business accounts
- The future tool Pinerly – Pinerly is a new 3rd party tool which allows to create a campaign and post it on Pinterest.
Pinterest enables businesses to stay connected with fans of their products and also gaining brand exposure. Some of the activities that a Business user of Pinterest has to perform on a regular basis are similar to maintaining other social media profiles.
- Repins – Re pinning pins which highlight your business and your specialties. Also, creation of new boards, following users, posting links and updating any new business information should be done regularly
- Adding new pins – would add indigenous content to the Pinterest board and lead to increased popularity
- Comments and Likes – Commenting on pins would yield user interest and may lead to more followers for the business profile. Regular ‘liking’ of pins is another means of maintaining an active profile
Pinterest has become a source for referral traffic than other social media sites like LinkedIn, Google+ and Youtube. Thus, marketers could profit by large with effective usage of this tool. Some valuable nuggets for marketing through Pinterest are:
- Understand the segment of your business, your target market and the competition. Thereafter, create a visually appealing image that would inspire users to repin
- Make easily pinnable content by adding social media share buttons near images
- Link the images with the respective page on your website and avoid messages that look promotional
- Track sales and other activity from the pinned images
Here are a few useful tools to analyze your activity on Pinterest
- Pinpuff – to calculate your Pinfluence, a measure of your popularity on Pinterest and also provides the value of every pin
- Pinreach – provides analytics to study your influence on Pinterest but does not provide a value estimation like in pinpuff
- Pin-a-quote – allows to post a quote to Pinterest. It has a bookmarklet with which you can simply post a quote by highlighting a text on any website like how you Pin an image from a site.
There are also other tools like Pin search, Recent activity expander, Pinterest right-click and Pinterest-pro. These tools can be used by marketers to analyse social activity and to find out ways to reach and expand their audience.
A recent study reveals that Pinterest has higher influence on consumers while selecting a product compared to Facebook. The reasons clearly state that Pinterest users show more interest in associating themselves with brands, get inspired on what to buy and also would like to get special offers from their favourite retailers. This trend has emerged because of the visual dominance aspect of the site where users spend time collecting and pinning images that appeal to their tastes.
Some of the popular Pinterest campaigns are shown below which show how brands are using promotions to market their product.
Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You Mum”
Consumer packaged goods giant Procter & Gamble’s Olympics tie-in strategy is to highlight the mothers of the athletes. The focus naturally lends itself to a Pinterest component. Though this Pinterest site, spotlighting the U.K.-based “mums,” is pretty sparse, P&G is likely to populate it more soon.
Peugeot’s Panama Puzzle
5French car maker Peugeot’s Panama unit recently ran a contest that awarded fans who completed a Pinterest puzzle. The brand’s Pinterest profile featured images of cars running over two or more boards. In each case, a board was missing. To get the missing pieces, fans had to go to Peugeot Panama’s Facebook Page or website.
This report is prepared by Amrutha Preetam, Research Analyst at DART Consulting. She can be reached at amrutha@dartconsultng.co.in
