Everything you ever wanted to know about Pinterest (but were afraid to ask) |
From weddings to dream homes to bucket lists, Pinterest's user-created and curated mood boards are a fascinating phenomenon to the social media community.
If you are reading this blog, you might be wondering how to harness the power of Pinterest's visual pinners for your brand and marketing efforts. In this 5 part series, we will take a look at different aspects of Pinterest and how they relate to brands.
Update: We've distilled the Pinterest wisdom from this series of blog posts into one handy downloadable eBook. We hope it's useful.
Part I: Just what is Pinterest, anyway?
Pinterest, the by-invite-only visual social sharing network, has seen impressive growth since its introduction in March 2010. The brainchild of Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann, Pinterest's mission is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting. Alexa now cites it as the 32nd most popular website in the United States. Daily, visitors spend more than 11 minutes on the site, showing up rival Twitter on this metric by more than 50%.
image courtesy of teckilla.com |
Whereas Twitter is focused on text via microblogging, Pinterest is fueled by image curation. The screengrabs, infographics, cartoons, and visual inspirational quotes that sometimes make their way to Facebook find a true home with Pinterest, where members are encouraged to pin, organize, share, and sort all the individual visual pieces of internet ephemera to create a kind of collective stream of visual memes. Pinterest is a little like Tumblr, in that it starts with a photo. But instead of presenting one photo at a time in the Tumblr style, Pinterest photos or "pins" gain context from being sorted by their pinners into "boards" of similar items or concepts for presentation.
a pinner's dreaming/doing pinboard about cake |
The active members of Pinterest browse, pin, and repin to experience things that are interesting and relevant, to capture visual images that surface in their web wanderings or that were surfaced because of friend curation - whiling away time in an aspirational or dreaming way. But they also are finding things that impact everyday life: crafts projects, planning birthday parties, designing a home on a budget. As their onboarding email says, "Pinterest is as much about discovering new things as it is about sharing." Topics that are fantastical and immensely practical are equally at home on Pinterest.
If you are thinking that all of this sounds suspiciously similar to what you did as a teenager with a piece of posterboard and your favorite magazines, you are right. Pinterest taps into that same human trait of dreaming by sorting activity that already exists in real life, from brides dog-earing bridal magazines, to home cooks building bookmark files of "someday" recipes, to interior designers collecting fabric swatches and paint samples. The Pinterest platform allows all of that activity and more to happen in a collective sharing way that is intensely visual and equally as engaging.
It is possible to build a robust following and a sense of community while posting to Pinterest on behalf of a brand, as long as the brand curator participates in a genuine way. It is important to remember that Pinterest is about individual expression and sharing, not about selling or broadcasting. Pinterest's Etiquette Guide stresses that self-promotion is frowned upon. You'll notice as you dive into the Pinterest platform that there is no easy way to search for a brand as a voice.
a sweater inspires discussion and repinning |
In this stage of Pinterest development, Brands are expected to behave as the individual participants of Pinterest do. Pinterest is thought to have a female-skewed demographic. Consumer-facing and female-centric brands have done well on this platform. Respect for the core users of Pinterest is important. In our interviews, we discovered many active pinners refuse to enage with a brand's pins on principle unless they find a connection to a person or point of view behind the brand name. A brand that tries to swim in the Pinterest waters without understanding the core user will find that there is not an audience for a broadcast or promotional kind of pinning. The members of Pinterest will simply ignore the brand pins and boards that they feel go against the spirit of Pinterest.
There are two main ways social media managers and internal brand advocates can optimize their Pinterest presences: by optimizing the brand content to be appealing to the growing network of Pinterest participants, and by joining Pinterest as a participant/brand curator. The first takes incorporating the Pinterest aesthetic into account when creating and publishing visually on the web, but is low-maintenance from a social media management stand-point. The second approach of being an active brand curator takes a great deal of energy and a regular flow of content, but has the advantage of using "push button" technology.
Whether active use of Pinterest is best left to the industries that are a natural fit with the interests of Pinterest pinners is a question only time and use can answer. In this five part series of Pinterest, we will take a look at how to optimize content for use on Pinterest, regardless of brand participation, the ins and outs of joining Pinterest as a brand curator, tips and tricks that help build a Pinterest community, and specific examples of how brands are using Pinterest today.
For more reading, see tomorrow's post in our Pinterest series -
Part II: Optimizing Content for Pinterest.
Post by Bliss Hanlin, Community Manager at eModeration