Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When it comes to Pinterest, many brands aren’t quite sure how to turn boards and pins into followers and potential customers. However, now more than ever it is important not to overlook this image sharing social network.

Pinterest users have proven that they trust their Pinterest networks to endorse solid products. These people trust their networks so much, in fact, that 47% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from Pinterest.

Pinterest also generates 4x more revenue per click than Twitter and 27% more per click than Facebook.There are a few brands, however, who have figured out the business potential of Pinterest. See how these 5 brands have been using it to the fullest...

...PInterest says that today, there are now tens of millions of product pins on its site, and early results show that these are generating higher clickthrough rates to the e-commerce sites versus regular pins.

The company has said that this year’s focus is on bringing more value to the pins users are saving on the site, not only with richer pins, but also tools for businesses including also improved Pin It buttons which now work in mobile apps, widget builders, and even analytics.

With the debut of price alerting, the company is challenging several startups which help consumers figure out when it is the right time to buy. Some of those are Decide.com, whose focus is more on consumer electronics and larger purchases for the home, plus recently launched Nifti, and even a Pinterest for price drops, Clipix, as well as a slew of older tools for price alerting and tracking sales. More generally, though, this also puts Pinterest up against other social product aggregators like Fancy or Wanelo, the former which has always been more of an actionable, shoppable feed of products, while the other is more focused on making it easier to find what’s popular at your favorite stores....

The “Interest Graph” is not the “Social Graph”. But what does that mean and why should you care?

Despite the rapid ascent of Interest-based platforms, such as Pinterest, Sulia, WeHeartIt and Wanelo, we rarely see dialogue about the Interest Graph except in a Social context. However, The Interest Graph and Social Graph are two fundamentally different infrastructures with different underlying assumptions for marketers.

Sure, they often overlap, but it’s time we come to appreciate their differences, so that we can be more effective marketers on a social web driven by people’s passions and interests.So should you be social or interesting?...

The image-driven network's meteoric rise in only a few years shows the site is more than just a pretty community for people interested in fashion and lifestyle: Marketers are all over Pinterest’s lead-generation aspects, and online hits on products from the site have proved a marketing sensation. According to a study by Shareaholic, the site drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined.

But marketers still struggle to define what makes for a successful Pinterest content strategy--and what does not. Based on my experience with Pinterest analytics and with the support of Pinterest-savvy folks at ShareRoot, I have come up with a list of metrics that marketers should pay attention to when it comes to this social network. Below, you'll find a helpful infographic that lays all the data out....