To Use Or Not To Use Pinterest?
You may have heard of the Pinterest story, but never really bought it. While Facebook and Twitter are conceived as the best platforms for social media marketing and online presence, even as omnipotent as they come across alongside Instagram and Snapchat, you should never underestimate the might of the dark horse called Pinterest. Even smart marketers are increasingly waking up to the reality that apart from “The Big Four”, there is an incredible “Number Five” with tremendous branding and content marketing potential.
Pinterest has workings in similitude to your favourite photo album or mood board. Since its emergence into the social media space in 2010, this bookmarking tool that has both a website and an app enables users to post or “pin” images found on the net to self-created theme-based photo galleries known as pinboards. It is more or less a true paradise for smart marketers because the users’ profile does not only reveal their aesthetic tastes but also the products they may like to purchase. Individual and business accounts on Pinterest are for free, but the company profile option gives you access to analytical tools that are not available otherwise.
Are you looking for a new way to market your brand online? Are you seeking to explore more modern possibilities, do less and reach more people? Yes, Pinterest may be the answer, and here are the reasons ‘for certain’.
It’s Sizable And Reaches Millions
There are more than 250 million monthly active pinners on this platform, and there are at 100 billion pins every day – these numbers are enough proof that Pinterest can help you reach an extensive range of in-demand audiences. Pinterest prides itself as one of the most female-skewed social platforms in the world.
A 2014 comScore study, according to Wall Street Journal, discovered that no less than 71 percent of Pinterest users are women, with most of them being based in the United States. According to another 2015 report by eMarketer, only 30 percent of the platform’s users are from outside the U.S. So, be honest with me. What reasons could have possibly encouraged a UK women’s fashion giant, Topshop, to tango with Pinterest at the latter stages of 2015 just to create a color palette tool for their e-commerce site based on saved ‘Pins’?
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Pinterest has all the makings of the most effective social media platform for businesses in the next century. Men and women are signing up on the platform in numbers, and male monthly users grew at a 120 percent rate ‘as at 2015’. You just pin and reach as much as possible – easy.
Better For User Engagement
Even though Pinterest is smaller than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter while being rated fifth amongst major social networks given its monthly active user count, the platform yet has a strong attribute those other platforms are can’t quite call their turf. The users on Pinterest are eager to share their dream products, plans, and aspirations.
According to John Jantsch, Founder of Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network, Pinterest is unlike other social sites where the gain is to get more followers. This little red island is where users seem quite content to find cool stuff and share it with small groups, being keenly interested in the hot and cool things.
This behavior translates accurately into the kind of vibe that influencer marketers hope to achieve. 75 percent of Pinterest users are not just visiting the site, but also actively engaging in decision-making – saving images and clicking all the way through, getting doses of the innovation Pinterest has to offer. If you want to engage users in a less disturbing, more innovative and non-conceited way, then Pinterest is the sure bet.
Building Visual Links And Traffic
Yes, all other sites do this. But, heck, we have all become quite drubbed and totaled by the chutes and watercourses of information like every single day. So anything that comes our way with proof that it can be easily digested with the barest minimum of mental engagement is actually the true online cake nowadays – hence the rationale of the whole narrative behind visual content.
In this wrestling arena, Pinterest is the undisputed golden title holder. And, most actually, marketers that build links through posted images on the platform are winners too. Pinterest, through an automatic process, creates links to the page from which you would be sourcing images, making it wieldy for you to acquire the kind of links that actually generate engagement. But, links from pins to your site are a no-follow. Most of the time, it is the startups driven by aesthetics that are probably in the best position to benefit from such a kind of link building. But that doesn’t mean you should give up so easily if it seems you don’t fit in. Think of the aesthetic content you are creating, attractive images properties and use Pinterest to make your foray.
It’s The Effective Purchase Inspirer
According to HubSpot, one of the most prominent attributes of Pinterest is that it has the ability to reduce the number of steps from the point of discovery to the point of conversion because visitors to the platform convert into leads or sales more quickly than on any other social media network. If you want to understand what exactly we’re talking about, take a good look at Perch Furniture’s effective products display alongside interiors and related furnishings. Observe how this custom sofa store in Portland, Oregon called Perch Furniture uses Pinterest to inspire, even in you, a buying action. Pinners are actually one of the most engaged and loyal advocates you can find online, using the platform to decide on what they want to buy. A Milliard Brown research showed that 87 percent of Pinterest users have purchased a product because of Pinterest and that 93 percent of Pinners have used the platform to plan a future purchase.
So, what are you waiting for? Now may be a good time to quit thinking and get pinning!
Image Credit: Pinterest
