Pinterested?

Pinterest has set the record for time to reach 10 million unique visitors per month. Read about 6 benefits for your business and why as a marketing executive, you should pay attention.

Pinterested?

With over 9,202% year over year growth from Jan 2011 – 2012, something tells me it’s worth your time to learn a bit about Pinterest and determine whether or not it fits into your company’s integrated Internet marketing strategy.

Unprecedented Growth

Pinterest has set a record for being the fastest company in history to reach 10 million monthly unique visitors. See the figure below of Pinterest.com US Traffic Data Measured by Compete.com in Monthly Unique Visitors. The data shown below is from Jan 2011 – Jan 2012.

Pinterest.com US Traffic Data Measured in Monthly Uniques – Data from Jan 2011 – Jan 2012, provided by Compete.com

US Pinterest traffic has grown from119,767 monthly unique visitors per month to 11,140,641 from Jan 2011- Jan 2012 according to data from Compete.com. This represents an unprecedented year over year growth rate of 9,202%. In fact, from Dec 2011 through Jan 2012 alone, US Pinterest.com traffic grew from 7,208,409 to 11,140,641 unique monthly visitors, representing a 54.55% one month growth rate.

If you are an Internet marketer, this is no doubt not the first time you are hearing about Pinterest, and unless you have been on vacation for the last 6 months, how could you have not heard of it? If you are like me, your first thought is oh great, another Internet marketing mousetrap for me to learn and chew up my time. Many of these new Internet mousetraps, like Google+, seem to be too big to ignore. Besides, as human beings, none of us wants to feel like we are missing out on the next big thing. It’s a ground floor opportunity. Right?

Being far from an expert in Pinterest, the best that I can do here is point out some observations that make me believe that the interest level in Pinterest is warranted and more than just a flash in the pan.

Pinterest Benefits

Before investing the time in reading on to learn more about this phenomena called Pinterest, a fair question for any reader to ask is what’s in it for me? Here are some Pinterest benefits to consider:

1. High users engagement, in fact Pinterest istied with Tumblr.com for the 2nd highest engagement of any website, just behind Facebook
2. Provides a popular channel for users to discover your image and video content, driving interested visitors directly to your website
3. Source of quality links to enhance rankings in the search engines, enabling increased search traffic. This indirect search traffic  is  incremental to the direct traffic cited in Pinterest benefit #2
4. Platform to showcase your brand through image and video
5. Large following not required to get value since Pinterest is an open website with a strong search capability and with users actively seeking interest-based content.
6. Brand legitimacy for large brands where the growing Pinterest user base will look for the brands that they traditional advocate for on other channels on Pinterest and those brands that they cannot find on Pinterest will speak volumes to the those advocates that are now Pinterest evangelists.

So now that you understand the potential benefits of Pinterest, what the heck is it?

Pinterst.com Homepage

Pinterest is an online pinboard application where users can “pin” up things they are interested in and organize them by categorized pinboards. Using these categorized pinboards, Pinterest lets you organize and share images and videos that you happen upon while browsing the Internet. Some popular uses of Pinterest and its pinboards include wedding planning, interior decorating, organizing and sharing favorite recipes (which dominate in the Pinterest.com homepage image above).

Users can you can browse others user’s pinboards and discover new things from other users who share common interests. When pinning an image or video, the pinner has the opportunity to add a link to an image or a link to any site you’d like.

Pinterest links are currently follow links (warning – geek alert), which suffice it to say, means that today, Google will follow and reward the website that is being link to which is why Pinterest can provide additional benefits to users who link to their own website beyond just the direct traffic, resulting in more traffic from Google searches (the secondary search effect).

The distribution and reach of your image and video content on Pinterest is through providing access for other Pinterest users to pin your content to their pinboards. This “repining” activity is what can broaden your reach as your content now shows up on their board and is more likely to be discovered. As users discover your content, some will follow you making it easy for them to stay connected with updates to your Pinboards and their contents

One of the aspects that make Pinterest unique relative to Facebook and LinkedIn, connections on Pinterest are interest-driven as opposed to by who a user knows. In other words, connections on Pinterest are driven by similar interests. The overwhelmingly graphical nature of Pinterest makes it irresistible to certain demographics (details below).

Pinterest Referral Traffic

According to traffic analysis from Shareaholic.com, based on referral traffic data aggregated from its 200,000 plus publishers which, collectively, reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.

Pinterest.com Share of Referral Traffic Based on Large Sample of over 200,000 Shareaholic.com publishers

Source: http://blog.shareaholic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/January-2012-Referal-Traffic.jpg

To keep this in perspective, Facebook, according to the Shareaholic.com data, provides 7 1/3x as much referral traffic as Pinterest, but sustained, accelerated growth by Pinterest, will lower this multiple over time.

Pinterest.com Demographics Data

The following information on Pinterest.com demographics was provided by DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google using data through January 31, 2012. Based on the Ad Planner Data, we see that the Pinterest.com audience is heavily skewed female with 21% male and 79% female, weighted nearly 4 to 1 female to male. From an age standpoint, 81% of Pinterest users are between the ages of 25-54, with 85% having at least some college education. Sixty-nine percent of Pinterest users have a household income of between $25k -$75K with 9% with household incomes of 6 figures or more.

Pinterest.com Demographic Data by DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google through Jan 31 2012.

For more information and for those interested in downloading the Pinterest.com Demographic Data by DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Exceptional User Engagement

Pinterest.com is an exceptionally “sticky” site and keeps it users engaged for long periods of time. In a recent study by comScore, it was determined that in November 2011, the average Pinterest.com visitor spent nearly an hour and a half on the site over the course of the month and more than 15 minutes per visit, ranking it third on consumer engagement. This is far greater than Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google Plus, but less that than the 142 minutes for Tumblr and the 394 minutes of Facebook, the current poster child for user engagement.

Source: http://blog.comscore.com/2011/12/state_of_the_us_social_networking.html

The data shown here for the leading social networking sites focuses on visitation to the primary web pages for the selected sites via home and work computers, and excludes any activity from mobile phones & tablets, which for some of the social networks, will skew the numbers lower.

Nonetheless, the comScore study numbers used for directional can provide guidance and insights relative to audience engagement metrics, helping marketing executives prioritize the social media investments.

Next Steps:

Pinterest is a place for users to congregate, connect, collaborate and celebrate their fashion, taste and image in a user experience that doesn’t currently exist anywhere else. Therefore, for certain Internet marketers with digital assets that map nicely into the Pinterest taxonomy and who demographics link up with those on Pinterest.com, the logical next step is to sign-up for Pinterest at Pinterest.com

Pinterest membership is currently by invite only, just like the original LinkedIn model. You can request an invite from Pinterest or you can be invited by someone who is already part of Pinterest. When you receive your invite, you can register through Facebook Connect or connect through Twitter.

Feel free to contact eBiz ROI if you would like us to formerly send you a Pinterest invite.

Extra Credit

Though not required to build a following on Pinterest external to Pinterest, it is always beneficial to post a Follow Me on Pinterest badge on your website or blog to allow those who find your site and are Pinterest users, to connect with you easily. As you can see at the top of this post, we have added a Follow Me on Pinterest Badge in the upper right hand corner – only seemed fitting, feel free to use (http://pinterest.com/ebizroi). It is easy to create your Pinterest badge at http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

Use the Follow-Button widget to create the code applicable to your Pinterest Account. To create the code necessary , click the button of your choosing below to select the HTML code to embed. Then, copy and paste the code onto your site where you’d like it to appear.

Additional Pinterest Resources

1. Pinterest: Just what exactly is on it? BBC News Magazine
2. The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Pinterest for Marketing by Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot
3. 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest by Beth Hayden – contributed by Mari Smith
4. Video: Add a Custom Facebook Pinterest Tab by Annie Infinite – contributed by Roz Fruchtman
5. Podcast: Add a Pin It With Pinterest Button On WordPress by Charly Leetham

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