Pinterest has grown to 70 million users since it was founded in March 2010, which is impressive for a social media platform. It has a unique demographic--80% of users on the site are women, and 50% of the users on the site have children. This provides a whole new marketing opportunity for businesses, but should you implement Pinterest advertising into your strategy just yet? Watch the video to find out if Pinterest advertising is for you.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video where we’re going to be talking about whether or not you should be using Pinterest. I’m Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me.
Good afternoon, Chad. There are so many new social media outlets; they seem like they’re coming fast and furious. The question is always, “Should I get into this?” So, today we’re exploring “Should I use Pinterest? What is it? Why should I care?” It was founded in March 2010 and has grown to 70 million users, so that’s a pretty astronomical growth. We have some interesting stats around that.
Seventy-one percent of them are in the U.S., and that’s an important stat, because sometimes you see big growth, but it’s just not in your country, and so it may not be your target audience and demographic. Another stat that’s fairly compelling for me is that the average time on site for Pinterest is 16 minutes. We know in the world of short attention spans on the internet that’s very very long. So these are some compelling usage stats, but let’s translate this into business terms, because internet marketers watching this video want to know, “Should I use Pinterest?”
The other day we talked about your social media strategy, and in that discussion we said, “Look, you really want to make sure that you’ve maximized the opportunity on Facebook and Twitter, because those are the two biggest platforms.” But, then there are a whole bunch of platforms that come in on that second tier. Of course there’s Google Plus, there’s Pinterest, there’s LinkedIn, and a bunch of others. So, lets think about where Pinterest is actually very useful.
What our experience has shown is that Pinterest is great if you’re in a category that has a very visual product. So, if you do food in restaurants, it’s very good there. Anything to do with wedding planning is really big, so wedding rings and wedding events. There’s a lot of home decor, architecture, and there are some other things again with cars and automotive that are very big. So, if you’re in one of those categories, Pinterest can be a really powerful medium for you. The other place that you should think about it is if in your business you’re creating a lot of visual information like infographics, again Pinterest can be a great place to share those infographics, and those would be very compelling reasons to want to get involved with Pinterest.
So, I think one of the interesting takeaways here for the question “Should I be on Pinterest?” is everyone probably should be. It’s probably easier for some categories than others, but as you pointed out, the direct play there is going to be pretty compelling. But I think that if you’re not finding ways to turn your internet marketing and your content marketing strategy into something visually appealing, you’re missing a whole opportunity, because almost any product or any service can be marketed visually if you get creative enough.
This is where we often get into tension with clients who are thinking, “Oh, that advertisement doesn’t really represent my business.” We say, “Yeah, but content marketing and infographic viral spread isn’t about advertising. It’s about sharing information. It’s about education.” So, sometimes you have to pull them a little bit out of their comfort zones, Chad, and convince them that they’ll get exposure, they’ll get buzz, they’ll get shares, they’ll get a few backlinks, they’ll get tweets, they’ll get pins. But, you have to move a little bit away from the advertising mindset and figure out how to make your product or service more visually appealing. I think that through educational and informative messages as well as just blatant creativity or humor is the way to go. In that case, shouldn’t all of our clients be on Pinterest on some level?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, like you said, it comes down to a bandwidth thing in many cases, where if you have the bandwidth and you’re looking to capture as many opportunities as possible, then absolutely you should do Pinterest. I think where I would probably say not to do Pinterest is if your bandwidth is only going to allow you to create the profile and put five pins and never touch it again. Then, I would say you’re probably better off not doing that and having an abandoned social media profile than taking that same effort and making sure you’re getting more effort put into Twitter and Facebook where the audiences are. So, if you have the bandwidth, do it. If you don’t, concentrate on just a couple.
Or, you can find someone to outsource it to who can keep the lights on for you. But, those are our thoughts. We want to hear what your thoughts are, what your experience has been with Pinterest, and whether you were able to a) get direct clients, or b) accelerate your search engine marketing and viral spread. Let us know what you thought, and subscribe.