How Pinterest is Overtaking Facebook
By now you’ve surely heard plenty about the new social media giant Pinterest, so we’ll cut right to the chase – what is it that makes it so valuable to businesses, and how is it having better or worse success than other social media empires like Facebook and Twitter?
Well for one, Pinterest is really a visual haven for consumers who aren’t so interested in the details so much as what they’ll be getting on the surface. For instance, you see tons of restaurants boasting their own “food porn” and a nice chunk of the users who are re-pinning those photos to their own clipboards could really care less about what each and every ingredient is in the dish. Instead they’re mainly focused how tantalizing it is to their appetite.
With that said, any business with products that look good when photographed well should definitely be engaging in the Pinterest world, especially if they’re looking to amp up their sales the same way they do with their Facebook page by engaging with their fans and occasionally posting photos and specials.
A recent study by the online jewelry mecca Boticca.com showed that after integrating “pinning” buttons to their website and social media platforms – the clicks from users engaging with their pins have amounted to 10% of their total sales (compared to 7% from Facebook).
They also found that Pinterest users typically were willing to spend about 100% more than Facebook users budget-wise, and also that most of these buyers were new customers where as most of their Facebook buyers were repeat customers.
Is that to say that a strong Facebook page provides a more solidified consumer base? Maybe so, but one thing is for sure, and that’s that Facebook users are definitely overall more engaged with the brands they “like” compared to the engagement from Pinterest users. Boticca.com found that a lot of their new “pinners” would click something to re-pin, but if it didn’t fancy them upon second thought (after arriving to the company’s actual Pinterest page), they would simply leave the page and not return.
Since then, Boticca seems to have developed a few ways to mitigate this “bounce rate”, namely by adding pop-up specials for users who had clicked over from their site. This way the customer is offered something else besides what they originally clicked on, which could very well be something more intriguing or at least something to keep them interested in finding out more instead of just leaving the page.
Overall though, the story here is that Pinterest seems to be driving more sales than Facebook, and it’s only been a big player in the game for a fraction of the time the other social media giants have been around. The statistics here are of course based on a study done by a jewelry store, but if something a bit different from say, a restaurant or home decorator, can get superior sales results compared to their Facebook with Pinterest, then it just goes to show that Pinterest is surely something you should consider as a business already engaged in several forms of social media!
Pinterest for Social Media and SEO
If you’re in Tucson, and you own a business, then you’ve probably been joining the social media and SEO trend as of late, if not long ago – when you should have. New social media outlets are popping up practically every day, but not all of them become as big as Facebook and Twitter, so it’s hard to determine which ones you should jump into and which ones you should be prudent of so as to not waste your resources. Sadly, Tucson SEO and social media isgenerally behind the curve oflarger cities and their businesses, and that’s why we’re here today to bring light to the wonder that is Pinterest.
Pinterest is a fantastic social media outlet with great SEO potential. In the past few months it’s grown to be one of the largest and most popular social media platforms around. Business owners everywhere are asking themselves the same thing: “Should I be following this trend or is it just another eventual flop (essentially) – sort of like FourSquare, Myspace, and Yahoo! Buzz.”
The answer is simple – YES, hop on the Pin Wagon. There are easily over 20 million users signed up, and “pinning” is becoming one of the best ways to spread your product and increase your web traffic. If you’re posting viral pins (things that people look at and go, “I want THAT. NOW.”) with enough followers, you’re not only spreading your business everywhere, but also links back to your website (where you should be pinning your everything from).
The greatest part about Pinterest is the demographic though, which can be deciphered from the infographic below (click to be able to further enlarge).
As you can see, Pinterest users are tech savvy, active, DIY, crafty, ‘average Joe’ kind of people. They like what most people like and they interact with their peers on a regular basis. Food and crafts are amongst their favorite hobbies, so Pinterest seems to benefit restaurant and home improvement type businesses the most. Fashion is huge too, so for example, salons and apparel stores have plenty to pin. There tons of niches to be filled though, so don’t count yourself out just yet.
There are people out there who love to look at weird stuff too, so even if you do dirty work it’s still feasible to be pinning. This is especially true because everything on Pinterest can be linked back to an origin, which – may we reemphasize – should always be your website if you’re pinning as a business. This is where SEO comes into play. With so many users and so much constant updating, Pinterest is definitely a quality site to backlink on – not to mention that your links multiply when your followers start to “repin” all of your original pins.
Okay, great – Pinterest is almost like YouTube (though mostly pictures) combined with Twitter and it comes with SEO potential, but how are you (the business owner) supposed to develop a fan base from the ground up? And enough so that it benefits you significantly, not only in the social media world, but also so that your link building there actually effects your search engine results.
Well, simple – use your social networking accounts! For Facebook specifically, there is an app that can be tied to business pages called WooBox. WooBox allows you to create a tab for Pinterest up where your photos, likes, map, etc. are located. When users click that they’ll be able to view and your Pinterest “boards” and repin directly from there, as well as open the boards and go directly to your business’s Pinterest page so that they can follow you.
Essentially, Pinterest is just another great way for you to showcase your business’s products and abilities, and it allows users to easily, and most importantly – quickly share them with others, because we all know how short the attention span of of online markets can be. The only downfall is that keeping up with pinning can be pretty time consuming, which is why you’ll want an agency, say Tucci Creative for instance, to handle that and the rest of your social media.
If you’re lacking when it comes to social media and SEO in Tucson, it’s probably because you aren’t committing enough to building your web presence, which honestly is completely understandable because as a business owner you should be more concerned with making your in store or servicing experience something memorable. That’s why there’s people like us out there.
Unfortunately, not all advertising agencies are going to be able to handle every aspect of your TV, print, radio, website, SEO, and social media all in one, but that’s exactly what Tucci Creative does, and that’s exactly why you need us to put you ahead of the curve and keep your business up to date with what’s important in the ever-changing, online world.
We’ll leave you with a great little article on how to benefit from Pinterest as a business.
