Pay Attention to Pinterest!
If you’ve never been on Pinterest, now may be time to start. As a marketer, it’s not only important to know what this social media is, it’s also important to understand why Pinterest can become one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal. A few years ago, it was hard to get traffic to your landing page or website from a Pinterest image (called a Pin.) But fast forward to 2018, and you’ll find that you can now purchase on Pinterest, see videos, visit heavily promoted websites, buy books, and even find business coaches. Pinterest has made a successful transformation from a fun social media experiment into a widely-used, commerce-friendly platform without losing the elements that made people love Pinterest back in their start-up days.
What’s So Special About Pinterest?
If LinkedIn is about business, and Facebook is about friends and family, Pinterest is about dreaming and doing. It might help old-school marketers to think of Pinterest as a magazine for modern consumers. It’s a place to find ideas. It’s highly visual. It’s full of products to buy, books to read, hobbies to explore, gardening tips to try, and life hacks to experiment with.
And like all of the best online tools, Pinterest algorithms curate the information you see, based on your browsing behavior. That means the platform’s code pays attention to the Pins you like and assigns importance to the types of images you spend time with.
For example, you start spending time with Pins featuring recipes for cupcakes, Pinterest will begin showing you lots of images and recipes for cupcakes. If you search for home repairs, your Pinterest feed will begin filling up with home repair Pins. Pinterest is set up to learn what you like, and populate your Pinterest feed with images and messages that matter to you.
A Marketing Gold Mine
For marketers, this is a bit of a gold mine. Pinterest puts a resource at your disposal that sends images and messages to consumers based on their interests. And these consumers want and expect information on how to buy, learn, watch, read, or access the products and ideas being featured in Pins.
This isn’t a passive audience. On many platforms, the most you can hope for is Likes or Retweets. As a business, Likes and retweets may make you may feel popular, but they may not help you see a difference in actual sales. However, on Pinterest, users see messages and images based on their past browsing behaviors, and they often like to click through. Pinterest users like to shop and buy.
For users on Pinterest, commerce is not an interruption, it’s an enhancement.
Is Pinterest for Everyone?
Is Pinterest a good fit for every business? Absolutely not. There are many categories that Pinterest users just don’t care about...for now. But as the platform rapidly grows and evolves, it might be smart to do periodic tests to see if the audience has changed enough to make sense with your business goals. Luckily, small, inexpensive tests are fast and relatively inexpensive. Cup O Content recommends you test in small doses frequently, and test different images, text on images, links, hashtags, and audiences.
But How Big is Pinterest, REALLY?
The following is taken from a Hootsuite blog. It’s such a good recap, that we're quoting them verbatim…
“Pinterest users
“Pinterest has over 200 million monthly active users. Figuring out who those users are, however, is key to engaging them.
“They’re millennials
“1 out of 2 U.S. millennials use Pinterest every month, more than any other age group. Usage drops incrementally as age increases, so the perception that Pinterest is just for moms is not entirely accurate. The next biggest age group is 30 to 49-year-olds.
“Women dominate
“Pinterest continues to be a female-centric platform. According to Pew Research, nearly half (45 percent) of all women online are Pinterest users—compared to only 17 percent of online men. This even after the platform tweaked its search results to more accurately target gender (i.e., users can search specifically for “male watches” rather than just “watches”).
“But usage among males is growing rapidly
“Yes, women tend to dominate the Pinterest landscape, but 40 percent of new signups are men. That’s a 70 percent increase in year-over-year growth. Also, a not insignificant one in four American Pinterest users are men.
“They’re global
“Most of the major social networks extend far beyond American borders, and Pinterest is no exception. More than 50 percent of all Pinterest users, and 75 percent of new signups, come from outside the U.S. That’s a truly global, cross-cultural audience.
“Besides the United States, the top three desktop users by country are Brazil, India, and Russia.
“They’re well educated
“Thirty-four percent of Pinterest users have at least some college education, while another 34 percent have more than a college education. That’s 10 percent more than users who have high school or less.
“They’re likely to have an above-average income
“Not surprisingly, being well educated also means that Pinterest users have money. Thirty-five percent have an income of over $75,000, a figure that rises to 50 percent when applied exclusively to millennials. The next largest income demographic is $30,000 to $49,000 (at 32 percent of users).
“These figures support the statistic that Pinterest users have a nine percent higher average income than non-users, according to Ahalogy.
“They live in the burbs
“The largest demographic of Pinterest users resides in the suburbs (34 percent), according to Pew Research. Another 30 percent of users are urban and 25 percent are rural.”
Still Need Convincing?
Pinterest doesn’t make sense for everyone (but then again, nothing does.) If you want to know how Pinterest might help your business grow sales, contact us at Cup O Content and we’ll answer your questions and help you think through your business problems, with no obligation. Contact us today.
Want to read more blogs about social media? Check out these Cup O Content articles.
