Pinterest has grown substantially over the last couple of years, 786% to be exact in the UK between 2011 and 2012; to become an invaluable source of referral traffic and for some brands, revenue. As a result, the platform has become an ever popular part of marketing plans as they look to drive additional influence and value from their content. For many advertisers, determining why they should be on the platform and what they can achieve are the first hurdles to overcome.
So how can you utilise this valuable audience effectively?
The success behind Pinterest
Before we look at tactics to approach with, the fundamental reason behind Pinterest’s success has been the quality and volume of engagement by its user base. This positions the pinning based platform as a credible measurement tool for content; one that can influence work produced for other platforms too.
- 80% of pins on Pinterest are repins, while only 1.4% of tweets are on Twitter are retweets, according to Flowtown. On top of that, the average activity of a super user includes them having 34 boards, 2677 pins and following 320 other users according to repinly. With the aforementioned growth of Pinterest traffic, this substantiates to a significant volume of engagement and that shouldn’t be diluted by marketers or brands.
- In addition, imagery has been widely accepted to produce considerably higher levels of engagement than text, with videos and images driving the most engagement from Facebook’s top 10 pages. As imagery is the main content medium on the platform (video can be uploaded too), this provides even more credibility to the influence brands should allow Pinterest activity to impose on their wider content strategy.
With the quality and volume of engagement on Pinterest, it provides a solid foundation to measure a brands output and identify new ideas to develop your content strategy across all the platforms active on.
To make this process successful, identifying the difference between what content brands thinks it should be producing and what it actually should be is a pivotal process. Alongside this, ensuring on-going measurement of the value of content across platforms is fundamental to improving the iterations of your strategy.
Say hello to Pinalytics
This is why Forward3D built Pinalytics; a service that helps you determine the value of your content, and others, across a multitude of social platforms including Google Analytics integration.
It ultimately allows you to measure and develop your content strategy on a day by day, and platform by platform basis by providing a range of functionality.
Pinalytics provides social share data for a piece of content on Pinterest using the original source URL for Twitter, Facebook, Majestic SEO Trust Flow and Citation, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon and of course Pinterest including comments, likes and repins.
Google Analytics can also be connected to show data against your own Pinterest account including traffic and goal conversions so you can place a ROI or traffic based return on your content activity.
Search functionality allows you to find content relevant to your brand, products or services and shows engagement levels across social channels as well as where the content originates from and who has posted.
With these features in mind, there are 3 main steps that Forward3D advise clients to use to evaluate and iterate their content strategy.
1. What’s working for you right now?
Connecting your Google Analytics account to Pinalytics will allow the ability to track goal conversions and other traffic metrics against content on Pinterest as well as what’s been shared and where. With this information, you can’t start to determine what kind of content does and doesn’t work and on which platforms.
This will then help dictate what existing content in your strategy to continue with and on which platforms.
2. Discovering new and valuable types of content
Utilising the search functionality within Pinalytics, you can search for brands, products and services that are relevant to a business to discover new pieces of content.
With the filtering and ordering options available too, you can then sort by metric to identify imagery thats working for other brands and websites and on which platform.
There is also the option to download all of the data and analyse the information at scale to help you steer your decisions on a greater set of data.
3. Discovering new and valuable influencers
Using the same search and filtering functionality, its possible to look at which users and websites have a strong influence over your desired audience and understand what content is behind them.
These could be individuals or websites that you want to deal with in the future either with content partnerships or even through advertising inventory.
For Pinterest specifically you can find people with a substantial following who are interested in your products/services and reach out to them. You can also find people with a large following, an interest in your product or service, though have limited content and would perhaps like to improve their boards with your content and links.
Letting Pinalytics dictate your content strategy
The measurement and discovery functionality that Pinalytics provides will allow your brand to allow highly relevant data to impose and influence your content and even wider marketing plans on an ongoing basis. Whether its what you produce and distribute, in addition to where and to whom, across the many platforms mentioned earlier on in this article – the data is there on a granular scale for you to action on a daily basis.
