Marketing Technology for Growth

Today, social pinboarding phoneme Pinterest will announce the release of a new set of tools to help brands analyze the effectiveness of their content marketing and social engagement on the platform. Known simply as Pinterest Web Analytics, product manager Cat Lee, in an interview with Reuters, is quoted as saying, "The goal is really to help websites understand what content is resonating with people on Pinterest.”

Is Pinterest the most sales actionable social network out there? This very question came to me as I came across a recent interview with Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann in MIT Technology Review. When asked the question oft-dreaded by many a techrepreneur, namely, “when do you plan on making money,” the first sentence of Silbermann’s reply struck me as instructive: “The whole reason Pinterest exists is to help people discover the things that they love and then go take action on them, and a lot of the things they take action on are tied to commercial intent.” While this snippet (the rest of his reply was similarly tangential to the question asked) sounds a bit like an opaque dodge, for business’ and marketers, it should be a clarion call to action.

As 2012 begins to wind down, it’s becoming clear that 2013 will be the year of personalization for marketers. So much has changed in 2012 about the way people find information. Search, for example,  has already shifted to give more personal results based on a user’s location and preferences, Facebook and Twitter allow for promoted posting and tweets targeted to a user’s profile. Pinterest was built to accommodate brand personalization, and for months now we have talked about how to utilize Pinterest for business. Now, Pinterest has made it that much easier with the introduction of Pinterest Business accounts and tools.

Pinterest is like that person in high school that everyone wanted to be. Pinterest is good-looking, popular, and it’s the center of attention online. Lately, I can’t help but notice that Pinterest is inspiring more than just the casual afternoon DIY craft project. The unique format of Pinterest’s user interface is making its way into the web redesigns of many other major online companies. A glance at a number of recent updates to websites including eBay, AOL, Stumble Upon, and even Facebook reveals that the simple, visual grid layout is this year’s most popular web trend.

Recognizing the importance of content is critical to developing any inbound marketing campaign; recognizing the subtle consumer shift in desire for visual over written content is even more critical. To capitalize on this trend, brands are scrambling to utilize the visual functionalities offered by social networks like Pinterest and Instagram.

In case you haven’t noticed, Pinterest is hot. In just the last year, the virtual pinboarding site has seen its web traffic grow from 700,000 unique visitors to 20 Million - half the unique visitors of Twitter. According to data from Compete’s Online Shopper Intelligence Survey, 1 in 4 consumers acknowledge that they are spending less time on other social media sites in favor of Pinterest. Brands are finding that a presence on Pinterest translates into sales. Roughly 25% of consumers reported purchasing a product or service after discovering it on Pinterest. Long presumed to be a social site dominated by women, Compete’s survey found that that 37% of males bought a product or service after seeing it on Pinterest, as opposed to just 17% of females.