The Power of Pinning
Pinterest, the newest of the top 10 social networks, is emerging with something that all advertisers value: natural targeting. Users of the 'virtual pinboard' skew heavily female (58%) and aged 25-44 (59%). The site is highly visual and Pinterest says that 'People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and share their favorite recipes'. Compete analyzed Pinterest's incoming and outgoing traffic and found that retail ecommerce sites were well represented.
ReadWriteWeb explained what it is like to get started with Pinterest (from a male perspective) and LunaMetrics provided a good look at six ways that brands could use the network. Pinterest has created two devices that are familiar to social media marketers -- web sites can install a follow button and a 'Pin It' button that is similar to a Facebook Like. Practical Ecommerce took a detailed look at the web site integration tools.
Pinterest is still 'invitation only' but brands are already on board and experimenting. Likeable described the efforts of nine brands that are early adopters and Search Engine Watch analyzed seven creative tactics that are available to marketers.
The functionality of Pinterest could obviously be replicated on one of the major networks (probably most easily by Google+ or Twitter) but there are some who believe that the specialized nature of Pinterest represents a new step for social networks. The Elad Blog wrote about push button curation, where users can easily share something that interests them without having to format a status update or worry about it getting lost in a stream. There is a lot going on with Pinterest, in will be interesting to see how much of it sticks around for the long term.
|