Is Pinning Set for Long-Term Winning?
Written by Betsy
Thursday, 19 April 2012 11:31
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What is Pinterest and how are brands using it? How will the platform's privacy policy impact future growth? This week Kairos Consumers asked Ellie Deutch, the Co-Founder and Chief Digital Strategist of Blitz Branding, to shed some light on this dynamic platform and its impact on brands.

Pinterest is an exploding online photo-sharing platform that heightens awareness of your brand and helps increase traffic to your webpage, blog, or social outlet. It is now the number three most-popular social network in the U.S. and is generating more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.

The platform has grown to over 18.7 million users since it’s launch in March of 2010, and has increased its daily user activity by 145% since the start of 2012. The growth of Pinterest is incomparable to any other social platform in the past 10 years, and has capitalized on the lone aspect that photos and videos are the highest engaging post types on the web.

Like Facebook and Twitter, it has allowed for brands to organically spread their messages to consumers and share experiences with them. It is being optimized by various types of brands (most successfully by beauty, fashion, food, crafts, DIY, and retail brands) and is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history.

Although currently 60% of users are female and the site has gained a reputation for largely being a repository for photos of wedding ideas and hairstyles, the male demographic is rapidly increasing and becoming more of an interest for marketers to try and connect with.

In particular, professional sports leagues and teams have picked up on this new trend and are beginning to dominate the space. There are competitor sites that have popped up since its inception that specifically target the male demographic, such as Gentlemint.com or TheFancy.com, but they will likely not grow or ever exceed the statistics that Pinterest has already done.

As great of a platform that PInterest is, many brands are hesitant to get involved due to its privacy policy and commercial use license, which states:

“Personal, noncommercial use to allow you to express yourself, discuss public issues, report on issues of public concern, engage in parity and as expressly permitted by the features of the Service.”

This policy dictates that you cannot repurpose any material that is not of your own possession, which inevitably creates a roadblock for brands to engage since consumers who grab their photos from websites, blogs, online magazines or other sources cannot be repurposed by that particular brand.

Pinterest will likely continue to expand and rapidly grow as the most popular social platform as of late, but without the capabilities of sharing content ownership, most brands with heavy legal policies will never find a way to correctly and efficiently interact with their consumers. It doesn’t go without saying that it’s important to listen and keep an eye on what users are saying about your brand, however. While you can’t control the community, you can at least be up to date on hottest topics and conversations about your brand or industry on Pinterest. Whether you’re using Pinterest yet or not, doing a quick search to see what pins, boards, or actual people are saying about your brand should be part of your weekly community management strategy.

While marketers and researchers will continue to study the trends and learnings from Pinterest to try and identify ways to better reach their consumers, you really won’t know what the platform is like until you try it out for yourself.

Go to www.pinterest.com.

Test it out.

Give it a whirl.

Learn if/what people are saying about your brand, and see if it’s a space that would be beneficial for your brand to be in.

 

- Elly Deutch, Blitz Branding Co-Founder and Chief Digital Strategist

Blitz Branding, a trusted partner of Kairos Consumers, is a digital branding and social media consultancy that focuses on the education and creation of online programming strategies for professional athletes, sports properties, and hospitality and entertainment brands. http://blitzbranding.com/

Last Updated on Sunday, 22 April 2012 21:11