Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Pinterest is booming. The site grew to 26.7 million unique visitors last month. This rapid growth has drawn businesses, especially retailers, to expand their presence on the site. Pinterest has just announced Pinterest pages for business.

My, those folks over at Pinterest have been busy! In the space of a few short weeks, users have been surprised by 3 new rollouts – verification of Pinterest accounts, the introduction of secret boards and now, the ability to create business pages.

So what does this new update mean for business owners? After all, it was not too long ago that Pinterest was warning us about self-promotion and commercial usage was downright prohibited.
Nevertheless, thousands of businesses have flocked to Pinterest since its inception in 2009 to create accounts and drive brand awareness in the hope of boosting sales.

Perhaps Pinterest has finally acknowledged that it’s time to woo the business community right before the crucial holiday season? Or maybe it’s testing the water for its monetization plans?...

[This is a positive development for marketers with one caveat. Watch for the terms of reference. Pinterest owns all material posted; not always the right situation for every business. ~ Jeff]

As Pinterest grows in use, it grows in value to journalists and news organizations.

At least for now, Pinterest seems to be most valuable relating to lifestyle coverage, contests, community information and events and photography. I haven’t seen any indication that it’s useful in breaking news coverage (though that could change, or you might have some examples to show how it’s already being used).

Here are ways that I suggest journalists and news organizations consider using Pinterest:...

[Some great ideas for PR and marketing too - JD]

Parlaying Pinterest: What you need to know about virtual pinboards...

According to an April 9 CNNTech piece, Pinterest is now the third most visited social networking site in the United States, behind Facebook and Twitter. The 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report notes that this doesn’t include mobile traffic. And by March, Pinterest had more than 104 million visits from people in the United States. The report refers to the site as, “the hottest social media start-up since Facebook and YouTube.”

Pinterest is a place for people to share photos, bookmark images, comment on posts and generate conversation around a visual centerpiece. The pinboards focus on topics like style, design, advertising materials or advice for new mothers, for example....

We all know everyone’s been talking about Pinterest – that it’s the fastest growing site on the Internet, that it sends more referral traffic to websites than Twitter now, and, of course, how it’s been storming the social media world. Are there good reasons why you as business bloggers should be paying attention? Below are 5 great reasons why...

Link building is easily the most groaned about aspect of SEO. It's hard, it's rarely scalable, it takes a ridiculous amount of time, and frankly, our lives would all be better without it.

Unfortunately, link building will always be a part of SEO, no matter how much we complain about it. Still, you have to change the way you think about it, and this past week at SES Chicago, I didn't speak on link building: I spoke on relationship building.

In my session, I talked about how you can use social media instead of email to start building that relationship with people. Twitter is one the easiest mediums for that, and with it comes a host of tools that you can use to help you search, qualify, and contact influencers in your niche. Here's that list of tools...

[Terrific tools ~ Jeff]

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]

Rethink the vision of your brand’s Pinterest by conducting a Pinterest audit, taking into account all of Pinterest’s uses and limitations.

I fell in love with Pinterest from the moment I first saw it.

And, according to industry response and the spike in user growth I wasn’t the only one.

We eagerly responded to this visually intoxicating social platform and went Pin crazy. We pinned anything and everything we found and liked. And in the process we probably made some questionable decisions that need to be reexamined.

Your Pinterest account is a reflection of your brand. Therefore, extra care needs to be paid when curating the images and user experience that will ultimately be seen as an extension of what your brand stands for....