Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Everyone loves the new visual bookmarking site Pinterest which grew by a staggering 400% in 2012 to nearly 40 million users.

But how can you take advantage of the insane virality of this social network?

The way Pinterest grew had little to do with Silicon Valley wisdom.

Pinterest, which CEO Ben Silbermann describes as a tool that helps people find inspiration, is now the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Internet.

But growth wasn’t easy for the company, Silbermann told a rapt audience at Y Combinator’s Startup School at Stanford University on Saturday.

The way Pinterest grew had little to do with Silicon Valley wisdom. It was about marketing — mostly grassroots marketing — not better algorithms.

In 2010, three months after Pinterest launched, the site had only 3,000 users. But some of them were active users, and those people loved the site — and both of those categories included Silbermann himself.
“Instead of changing the product, I thought maybe I could just find people like me,” he said.

So Pinterest started to have meet-ups at local boutiques, and to take fun pictures of people who attended them, and to engage with bloggers to do invitation campaigns like “Pin It Forward,” where bloggers got more invites to the site by spreading the world....

[Really like Silberman's thinking about launching a product and avoiding groupthink ~ Jeff]

Pinterest may be the darling of the social media world, but it has not been widely embraced by agencies. A new survey by the Creative Group finds that only 7% of advertising and marketing executives said their firms are using the visual social network for business purposes and 44% have no interest in adopting Pinterest.

Another 18% had never heard of the site, and 17% said it caught their eye but they were hesitant about using it for work. Just 10% said they planned to start using Pinterest as a business-related tool. Staff at larger agencies were more likely than those at smaller agencies or companies to be on Pinterest. Among those with more than 100 employees, almost a quarter (24%) used the virtual pin board as part of the marketing mix, compared to 19% at those with fewer employees.

But a higher proportion of smaller firms planned to go on Pinterest -- at 30%, compared to 6% of large firms....

[Though Pinterest isn't for every brand or comm program, survey still surprises me - JD]

Marketers have a new tool available to them with the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses. Late last year, Pinterest began rolling out new business tools for companies using the social media platform, and Pinterest Analytics is the next logical step to help marketers use the medium successfully.

Many brands and companies have taken to Pinterest to promote products and share content. Rather than tell customers about your product, Pinterest makes it possible to show what you have to offer. And the online scrapbooking site allows your customers to share your content that they find interesting as well.

This is where the new Analytics feature comes in. Now you can track, in any given period, what content your customers are engaging with the most. What content resonates with your audience? What is driving traffic to your website?

The new tool offers several useful pieces of information for business users to track. Here’s an overview of the new tool and its unique features...

Pinterest burst onto the social media scene and has managed to steal the limelight in this ever growing genre of websites. In just two years they've grown so fast that they now rank as the number 3 social network.

What’s the attraction you might ask?

Visuals. The site has tapped into the rapidly growing trend for images and videos. There are no blog posts or articles, just attractive, poignant, funny or touching images. It’s fun, effective and hugely popular with over users to date.

If you are considering adding Pinterest to your digital public relations toolkit take a look at how other brands are using the site. Learning from the pros can help you to avoid making mistakes and start achieving the benefits quickly.