Pinterest burst onto the social media scene and has managed to steal the limelight in this ever growing genre of websites. In just two years they’ve grown so fast that they now rank as the number 3 social network. From May to June Pinterest’s referral traffic to Shareaholic’s network of about 200,000 sites grew by 43.7%. Pinterest already drives more traffic to sites that use Shareaholic than Bing and Twitter and it’s only 0.10% away from overtaking Yahoo organic search!
What’s the attraction you might ask?
Visuals. The site has tapped into the rapidly growing trend for images and videos. There are no blog posts or articles, just attractive, poignant, funny or touching images. It’s fun, effective and hugely popular with over users to date.
If you are considering adding Pinterest to your digital public relations toolkit take a look at how other brands are using the site. Learning from the pros can help you to avoid making mistakes and start achieving the benefits quickly.
Whole Foods
Whole Foods has an excellent grasp of how to use social media effectively. They’re one of the power players on Pinterest and have more than 69,000 followers and they’re the first company which is not fashion or media related to make the top 10 most popular brands on the site.
They have been able to incorporate their brand by creating pin boards such as:
• Eat Your Veggies
• How Does Your Garden Grow
• Super-Hot Kitchens
• Delicious Art
• Cheese is the Bee’s Knees
They post pictures of arty food, incredible kitchens and even images showing strength. This is a brand that recognizes the importance of sharing the content added by other people. They will follow users, comment and repin any content which fits into their pin boards. They will also pin content from websites other than their own, which is always important if you are looking to interest people and gain a following.
The Perfect Palette
The Perfect Palette is a wedding blog which will help couples decide on what color palette to choose for their big day. They have managed to attract more than 290,000 followers on their profile by creating beautiful pin boards based on colors. This is a clever technique as it not only fits into the needs of people planning a wedding, but it also attracts people who love certain colors, interior designs, clothing and accessories, flowers and cakes. And note that The Perfect Palette shares other people’s content rather than just post their own.
Mistakes to Avoid
With all the buzz about the success of Pinterest it may be surprising to learn that some of the largest brands on Pinterest are failing to create much of an impact. Ikea is relatively new to Pinterest and they have managed to create some stunning pin boards, which certainly look appealing. There is also a ‘pin it to win it’ board to encourage interaction. They are slowly growing their followers, but they have missed an important trick: pictures taken from websites include the link back to the site, and it appears that none of the pins are linked back to the product pages as yet, so this is something which the team will need to work on.
Nike Football has gone to the trouble of creating an account, but as yet the following is slow – only 166 followers and 0 likes so far. Either they are missing the mark with their content or they have not promoted their boards to their fans. Since at least 75% of the users on Pinterest are women, perhaps Nike should be focusing on women’s soccer here?
The important message to take away from the brands doing it right is to interact well on the site, and create interesting and creative pin boards to spark an interest in the users of the site.
The points to learn from those failing on Pinterest is to ensure you link your pins to your pages online, and pinning content that resonates with the people you want to attract and then letting them know you are on Pinterest.
Material for this post was contributed by Carlo Pandian, a freelance writer on public relations, social media marketing and careers for http://www.mediarecruitment.co.uk/.
