Is Pinterest a Social Media?
Not exactly, anyway. You can find plenty of folks who certainly know what they’re talking about clambering for both sides. Some make the case that Pinterest is a social platform because of its hybrid tendencies. Others will say that it positively is not social media as its objectives naturally counteract what a social media outlet tends to offer.
Thing is, in a way, they’re both right. Pinterest is a hybrid and it specializes in connecting you to the things you love. It is very effective at being a place to inspire you and, usefully, save your inspirations for later when you have the time.
In this way, it is very much not a social media outlet. Facebook especially, is a place where we attempt to present the very best of ourselves even to the point where it doesn’t accurately represent real life at all. Twitter is notorious for being snarky at its best. Pinterest does not share these infamous reputations.
Pinterest is good at emulating the more traditional aspects of social media. Sharing, following and obsessive-compulsive stalking are all familiar social media tropes that Pinterest has not entirely done away with.
Pinterest Statistics
Why sure, you can follow people whose content you like and spend hours scrolling through friends’ feeds. But there’s a lot more to Pinterest than chasing likes and followers. Just check out these stats:
- 200 million monthly users
- 50% of millennials are Pinning
- 68% of women 25-54 use Pinterest
- 40% of new users are men
- 93% of users Pin to plan purchases
- 50% have made a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin
- Two-thirds use saved Pins while shopping IRL
- Responsible for 5% of all referral traffic
- Extremely high cart average of $58.95
- 2 billion monthly searches (See, it’s not social media, it’s a search engine!)
The bottom line is, Pinterest users interact with and utilize the platform differently than they do with more traditional forms of social media. And its ceiling may be much higher than you think. Here are four ways Pinterest can prove more effective for your business than social media.
Pinterest Pairs Well with SEO
When someone pins something, it always links back to the original URL that was posted. This means you can manage to get a ton of referral traffic in perpetuity. Search engines love that stuff. When you get a crazy amount of hits to your landing page from one source like that, Google thinks you’re a rock star. And Pinterest users are famously generous with their saves and clicks.
Pinterest now uses its own new feed algorithm to attempt to display for users the most relevant pins for them as opposed to the chronological feed that it used to display. Why does this matter to your SEO strategy? It gives you a leg up because it gives preferential treatment to thoughtful, relevant content, which you’ve got! So, as long as you’re investing in great content, you’re going to be at or near the top of your followers’ feeds.
Just as with Google, you’ll want to optimize your keyword usage for search. The best way to do that is to use Pinterest’s own search tool. Much like Google, it’s going to start giving you suggestions as soon as you begin typing. Be ahead of the game by going after long tail keywords (phrases, essentially) as opposed to single words as they’re overly competitive. Drill it down and you’ll set yourself apart.
Use Unique Images to Garner Attention
You’re probably thinking, “Unique images? You know I can make fantastic pictures and post them to absolutely any social media platform, right? Pretty sure digital images have been a thing since, like, forever now.” But Pinterest offers a bit of a twist to the wide, landscape pictures we have become accustomed to.
Bucking the trend, Pinterest loves (and truncates) images so that they are much more vertical than they are horizontal. When done well, it actually looks pretty sweet.
The main thing it does though, is make you think about your posted images in a totally different way. While that may be inconvenient for posting simultaneously across multiple platforms, it does offer the added benefit of being unique. And not everyone (in fact, hardly anyone at this point) is making full use of this, making it yet another way to set yourself apart using Pinterest.
Here’s what you do: create images that are skinny and super long instead of turning your phone sideways and filling the screen with as much landscape as you can possibly fit into six inches. The longer they are; the more real estate they are going to occupy on the user’s screen. I can’t tell you how many terrific images I have seen that have no idea they are being thrown onto Pinterest because they are wide as the Grand Canyon and were truncated to the smallest part of the feed to go unnoticed by all but the most discerning of viewers.
Create beautiful, long, lean photos and infographics and you’re sure to get noticed – I mean, “Saved”.
This Is Your Crowd
We have already gone over many significant statistics, but the bottom line is, with Pinterest, you’re putting your brand in front of a very unique mass of potential customers.
To generalize:
The Facebook audience is somewhat engaged but older.
The Instagram crowd is very engaged but younger.
The Twitter horde is just plain mean.
Pinterest offers a combination of diversity and engagement not seen elsewhere. On top of that, they are more valuable leads. When a Pinterest user follows you or Saves a pin, you can be much more confident in a conversion because they aren’t just saying, “I ‘Like’ this, let’s move on to the next thing I ‘Like’”. They’re saying, “This is important enough to me to save for later. I fully intend to come back to this later.” For a marketer, there is an obvious advantage here.
It is the Best Way to Beat Your Competition
They’re likely using it wrong if they’re using it at all and you’re going to do it better.
Do I even need to expostulate on this one?
Okay, Pinterest has upgraded many things in 2018 and that includes their current feed algorithm. They have expanded their audience and engagement levels. They have quietly become more marketer-friendly.
Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram social media marketers over the last year or so have either become disillusioned or panicked. This particular market is incredibly over-saturated and has become stagnant if not depressed on top of that. Neither platform has made it easier to advertise. On the contrary, more and more experienced social media marketers have come out and said that these platforms are just plain complicated to use and analyze.
To bottom-line it once more: If you’re currently searching for a new social media marketing strategy, leave some of the SMM behind and drastically increase your Pinterest efforts (it’s SEARCH not SMM!).
If your competitors are using it at all, they’re almost certainly using it less effectively than you’re going to with your newly-found advice. This is the Wild West of Internet e-Commerce marketing.
Enormous following
+ young demographic
+ active shopper
x excellent content
= we beat our competitors at marketing and sales and the whole universe.
So that’s pretty much how Pinterest works, y’all.
About the author: Ashlee Swenson is a professional writer at homeworkpay. Besides, she is fond of Psychology. In this case, she takes part in different conferences and presentations to get more knowledge and obtain experience. She dreams of helping people cope with their problems. You can see more information here.
