Pinterest is a fashionable topic these days–predictions about the new social site are gaining ground amid pronouncements about Facebook‘s Timeline feature/Newsfeed/IPO/negative effect on high school students’ performance and gossip about the iPad 3. Though the site has no hint of commerce in its design, it has quickly become a hot spot for retailers, currently driving over twice as much referral traffic as Google+, YouTube, and Linkedin combined.
The new site’s rapid growth rate far outstrips that of other social sites. It’s all the rage among women, many of whom are parents, and many of whom have an annual income of over $100,000. To put it more bluntly, Pinterest users make up a prime category of shoppers and retailers would be foolish to ignore this fact. And they aren’t; having already swallowed the social media pill, increasing numbers of brands are utilizing Pinterest for promotion. Econsultancy published an 11-point guide for brands to effectively use the social site, including examples for each suggestion.
With tactics like showcasing products, running competitions, and highlighting press coverage of your brand, it sounds like Pinterest may become a platform for marketing methods that work on Facebook, or on Twitter, or on brand websites, or somewhere else, to smoothly converge. (Content Ping recently discussed the marketing, if not merchandising, potential of Pinterest.) Econsultancy’s article also points out the incredible potential for market research by simply investigating the Pinterest behavior of users who engage with your brand.
Read all 11 ideas and see who’s doing what at econsultancy.com.
