Friday 24 October 2014

Pinterest: Not Just Interior Design & Cats - There’s Real Money To Be Had

This month’s guest post on all things social comes from Marketing Insights Analyst, Natalie Meehan. Natalie has worked in marketing for almost a decade, and forms part of Brandwatch’s marketing insights team - writing reports and other content about all things social. She keeps a big, well-stocked tin of sweets on her desk at all times.
 
Think Pinterest, and you might think it’s just a platform for perving over rainbow layered cakes, or watching people try and fail at recreating hairstyles that require scaffolding and a week off work to achieve.


The thing is, Pinterest is a whole lot more than that.

Bringing in the mega bucks

It’s a money spinner, and one that’s crazily underutilised by businesses. Want to see some facts and figures and some unnecessary caps lock? OF COURSE, YOU DO.
The average order placed by Pinterest shoppers at $169, nearly $100 more than orders placed from Facebook and Twitter adverts.
  • Pinterest users are high earners, with 28% earning more than $100,000 a year
  • Pinterest drives 7.10% of web traffic that sites receive, more than Reddit or Twitter
  • 69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item that they’ve then purchased, or intended to.
It’s clear to see that Pinterest is not just kittens and cupcakes. With Pinterest being a far more open landscape than Facebook or Twitter, it’s much easier to see what exactly people — your potential customers — are interested in, and savvy businesses are using this data in a myriad of ways, including to ‘reverse showroom’, or use secret boards to drive sales.


 

Using the right tools for the job

Community Managers in all sectors will likely be well-versed in using social media management tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. These platforms enable you to make the most of a lot of your social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all mostly pretty easy to manage and report on. But I’m not going to teach granny to suck eggs here. You’ll know this already.
What you may not know is that there are a number of analytics tools that enable you to manage your Pinterest accounts in the same way.
These lesser-known tools are perhaps a step into the unknown, a leap of faith. Do you pick a free tool, and hope for the best, or shell out for a paid option and cross your fingers that you’re going to get at least some return on investment?

We decided to delve into the murky world of Pinterest analytics  tools mainly out of curiosity. We were trying to decide what would  work best for us as a company, and we realised that there wasn’t all that much information out there.What we wanted was a simple report that rated everything out there in a clear and simple manner - one that would help us make the best business decision for us.
We couldn’t find one, so we made one.

Making the right choice just got a little easier

We’ve evaluated Pinterest’s top tools, giving marketers an insightful overview of the industry which stretches far beyond Pinterest’s basic web offering.

For each tool we’ve isolated five key areas to most simply describe the functionality -
  • Competitor Analysis: How can you use the tool to track competitors profiles and benchmark your brand’s performance against others?
  • Historical Data: How far back can the data be retrieved from Pinterest prior to the date of your initial subscription?
  • Scheduling: Does the tool have the feature to schedule the publication of pins, and is it any good?
  • Website Traffic: How about metrics that show traffic data relating to your website and different pins?
  • Pin Metrics: How does the tool display native Pinterest engagement metrics such as likes, repins and comments?
We’ve also included a detailed index for these metrics and criteria, because buzzwords can get pretty buzzwordy, if you know what I’m saying.


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