According to a survey of 4,851 U.S. online consumers conducted by online comparison site PriceGrabber between March 13 and 26, Pinterest drives buying: 21% of respondents who use the site say that they have purchased a product after seeing its picture on the site. The most commonly purchased products were food- and cooking-related (33% of those purchased), fashion/clothing (32%), home decorating (30%) and crafts (26%).
Searching for recipes is the favorite interest among pinners: 70% of Pinterest account holders cite cooking and recipes as the top item they pin. 65% of Pinterest users pin home decorating inspirations, 53% craft ideas, 41% fashion and shopping ideas, 34% entertaining ideas, and 33% gardening.
How regularly do Pinners use the site? 37% of users surveyed log in a few times a week, with only 10% saying that they use the site a few times a day. 55% have created between 2 and 10 Pinboards.
And there’s still a lot of room for growth: 58% of consumers do not have a Pinterest account, and 32% said they are not familiar with Pinterest.
More at: http://therealtimereport.com/2012/04/02/pin-commerce-21-of-pinterest-users-have-purchased-a-product-they-found-on-the-site/
Sitting through stuffy lectures with a monotonous teacher is a student’s worst nightmare. But Pinterest may be changing that. Yes, Pinterest, the site where people pin their favorite pictures on boards to share with the world.
With Pinterest gaining traction by the day, it’s becoming a valuable tool for educators. Not only are teacherssharing tipsand using the site to grabideas for lessons, it’s being used as a teaching tool too.
Pinterest is helping inspire students, increase student participation, and helping them tell stories.
For example, University of Minnesota adjunct instructor Leslie Plesseris usingPinterest in her basic media graphics class. Though her students are not graded for their use of Pinterest specifically, they are required to use it with their activity being factored into their participation grade.
“I am looking at their design work and comparing it to what they ‘like’ on Pinterest to see where they are drawing their inspiration from and it helps me to understand their personal design aesthetic, which I can then use in determining their project grades and in any advice I give on their work,” Plesser told theDaily Dotvia email.
The students are interacting with each other on the site as well, as they follow each other and often repin items their peers have found.
More at: http://mashable.com/2012/03/22/teachers-using-pinterest/
More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9342-peugeot-uses-pinterest-to-launch-puzzle-competition
Peugeot Panama has launched a Pinterest-based competition that asks people to complete puzzles by repinning images of its cars.
Last week the brand created several boards depicting different models with pieces missing.
People can search for and find these pieces, pin them on their own boards and share it with Peugeot. The first five people to complete their boards win prizes.
Though a visit to the brand’sPinterest pageleaves you somewhat confused at first, since several boards have been used as placeholders – separating the cars into different price brackets.
One such board is titled ‘Starting at 35,000us’ and is toally blank, with no content pinned. It’s an interesting way to use the space, but isn’t immediately obvious.
On the bottom row (on our screens at least, see below) – the first four board titles are used to explain the contest, with another placeholder then showing the ‘contest boards’.
People are asked to click any board to find out where to look, which is explained as follows:
This is a 5 piece puzzle of a Peugeot 3008, as you can see there are 4 pieces missing. Look for them in our website (peugeot.com.pa) or in our Facebook fan page (www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1797346790), pin them in your own board and share it with us. The first 5 people to complete their boards win!”
Using boards as placeholders is certainly one of the most creative uses of Pinterest we’ve seen so far, but sadly it’s overshadowed by the fact that the puzzle itself isn’t very clear.
It’s difficult to work out how you’re supposed to get involved, and even the brand itself has had to step in to inform a participant that the goalposts had been changed:
Hi Julia!, thank you for participating in the Peugeot Puzzle Contest, sadly as you may know, Pinterest changed our layout so we were forced to adapt the contest again. Please feel free to leave your board and start pinning again. Best Luck!”
That said, Peugeot Panama uses a conversational tone in its outreach above and is trying something new - so should be applauded for doing so.
However, it might transpire that a simpler competition, with mechanics that are easier to understand, might be more successful in driving participation in the long run.
Now that social curation site Pinterest has become the hot-new social thing, with loads of traffic and highly addicted community, it seems to be time for spammers to take advantage of its traffic and intense virality.
Earlier this evening, some kind of spam-exploit injected javascript code that started replacing many Pinterest photos with ads for Best Buy. (see photo.) The actions resulted in disgruntled users blaming Pinterest. A recent study claimed that Pinterest was referring more traffic on the web.
Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral trafficreport, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.
In the era of social, what is amazing is how quickly the spam attacks can spread and have an impact. I sincerely hope Pinterest has brought this under control. I for one, am rooting for that hot little company.
Pinterest is planning to release redesigned profiles this week, according to CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann.
“I’m so excited about it,” said Silbermann (pictured, left), who spoke at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday. “We wanted to make it more beautiful … to make your profile different in kind than the profile you have on Facebook.”
Silbermann emphasized new discoverability features in the redesign, saying he and his team wanted to make it easier for users to stumble upon other like-minded users, and highlight the people their connections are repinning images from.
He also said the team is working on expanding the number of things users can pin, including video. Soon, people will be able to pin from Vimeo, Hulu and Netflix, among others. And, as was revealed earlier this week,an iPad app — as well as a public API — are also in the works.
At the beginning of the interview, Silbermann spoke of his inspiration for Pinterest, saying it was a project he always wanted to build. “I collected insects, I collected stamps,” he recalled. “I was obsessed with this idea that what you collect says something about who you are.”
He also talked about the site’s original design. “We labored over that grid,” he said. “There were literally dozens of that which were fully coded. We felt like, if your collectios didn’t look awesome, if they weren’t beautiful, why would anyone spend the time to build them?”
More at: http://mashable.com/2012/03/13/pinterest-redesign-api/
Pinterest’s potential isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. But if you’re a digital manager, you need a clear point of view on this for those you advise.
Yes, there’s hype, butPinterestis the front edge of at least two important digital marketing trends.
This is the first in a series of three posts taking a strategic view of what’s shaping-up to be 2012’s breakthrough new social network.
What’s Pinterest?
Pinterest, in case you haven’t heard of it, isTumblr with some different features. Like Tumblr, it allows you to post your own stuff, as well as stuff you find around the internet, with the click of a button.
Where Tumblr is a blog variant, Pinterest lets you set up sub-blogs built around a particular interest or topic. So you can post all thecute pictures of pugson one board and all the picturesabout the economyon another. It also lets you search everyone else’s boards easily.
That’s really about it. One friend described it as “Delicious for pictures”. Of course, delicious is text-driven and used by guys, while Pinterest is a scrapbook designed to drive relentless word-of-mouth referrals among women and apparently, Silicon Valley investors.
The size of Pinterest’s splash
So why is there so much buzz around this? The numbers: The site beta-launched in March 2010 and is still invite-only.
Despite this, the user base surpassed 10m in December, and according to Google DoubleClick, now has 21m worldwide unique visitors per month.
Forrester analyst Darika Ahrens sums up Pinterest’s allure below:
Pinterest is well known for having a demographic of 18-34-year-old, upper-income women from the Midwest - if that’s not who you sell to, then Pinterest may not be for you,’’ she said. “I’d ask, can you afford to be playing with pretty pictures when there are other, more urgent, interactive marketing priorities?’
Of course, as women make a huge range of purchase decisions for themselves and others (think travel, health care, home goods, food) having first-mover advertage can be an attractive proposition to many brands.
One of the things I appreciate about Pinterest is who uses it. When I look at the people I’m connected to on Google+, most of the posts I see are from a small number of tech-savvy ‘early adopter’ social media windbags.
They post a lot. But I don’t see ordinary people on G+. Not as they are on Facebook, and Pinterest. There are many more ordinary people in this world. Unlike G+ and Twitter, Pinterest didn’t have to jump a chasm to get to a majority market, its where they started.
And Pinterest is easy to use. Lots of people don’t get Twitter, or the value of an unstructured stream of 140 character utterances. But organizing collections of inspiring images is a natural, even reflexive task. Its social media, but with only the need to curate images you like. That’s a low barrier to participation.
The social media hype cycle is suggesting the solar system has a new axis called Pinterest. Is it wrong?
- SJ Mercury News: Pinterest, not Facebook, is Silicon Valley’s hottest social network. (Guess it’s too late to get in on Facebooks’s IPO.)
- CNBC: “He credits the fast-growing site Pinterest for amplifying his online sales to 50 percent of his current business. On the site, he can let his art speak for itself.” (Was it speaking for someone else on another site?)
- Tire Review (not making that up):Is Pinterest of Any Interest for the Tire Industry?
- There’s already a service whichclaims to analyze one’s influencethrough Pinterest.
- Heck, the U.S. Army has evenput out a manual on using the site. (File under: You know you have too much money when…)
Is Pinterest for real?
This just has the feel ofColor– remember Color? Less than a year ago itscored $41m of investmentfor its photo-sharing app from Sequoia and Bain Capital. And in social media it was everywhere — for all of two weeks.
Then everyone forgot about it after realizing its business model was the classic “Make something cool and hope Google buys it.” (And believe me, I have nothing against that business model. All offers cheerfully considered, Mr. Brin.)
More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9290-what-is-pinterest-and-why-should-anyone-care
Fact: Pinning causes a significant drop in testosterone. Well, not really, but that’s what newly launched social bookmarking site MANteresting would have you believe.
The “Pinterest alternative for men” replaces pinning with nailing (don’t you feel more manly already?) and doesn’t require sissy invites to get started. Go ahead, fellers, nail the crap out of bacon recipes, powertools, and Chuck Norris words of wisdom.
Start nailing at MANteresting.
Pinterest is arguably the hottest social media site on the Internet—user traffic to the online social catalog has skyrocketed since mid-2011—but the website also boasts strong audience engagement, retention, and “virality” among its core demographic, according to a report by RJMetrics.
Based on data collected and analyzed by RJMetrics, key findings from the report include:
- Pinterest is retaining and engaging its users 2 to 3 times more efficiently, on average, than Twitter was at a similar time in its life cycle.
- “Pins” link to a huge array of websites. For example, Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it accounts for only 3% of pins.
- 80% of pins are “re-pins,” attesting the viral nature of the Pinterest community. By contrast, at a similar point in Twitter’s life cycle, roughly 1.4% of all tweets were re-tweets, according to a study conducted by Hubspot in 2009.
- The “quality” of the typical new Pinterest user (where quality is defined by a user’s level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high, but declining. Users who have joined Pinterest in recent months are 2 to 3 times less active during their first month than users who joined before them.
Below, detailed findings from the RJMetrics report Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look.
Pins Connect to a Vast Array of Web Sources
On Pinterest, every pin (or linked image) ties back to an external link. Among a sample of roughly 1 million pins, more than 100,000 distinct source domains were found.
Among those 100,000 domains, the following chart shows the top 20 sources. The most popular domain was Etsy, which powered just over 3% of pins. Google was a close second, though almost all Google links point to Google Image Search, which is technically misattributed content from other 3rd party domains, RJMetrics points out.
Flickr (2.5%), Tumblr (1.1%), and weheartit (1.0%) round out the top 5, after which no domain represents more than 1% of pins.
The Viral Nature of Re-Pins
The analysis also broke out the population of pins by how those pins were posted to Pinterest.
Remarkably, over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the impressive level of “virality” at work in the Pinterest community.
By contrast, a study conducted by Hubspot at a similar point in Twitter’s history found roughly 1.4% of tweets were retweets.
Surprisingly, a low proportion of pins originate from pinmarklet, a browser bookmarklet that allows users to pin content from any website via one click.
Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/7173/whats-driving-pinterests-amazing-growth#ixzz1nWWleNvG
A recent study has shown that Pinterest is more popular with men than women in the UK. This is, at first glance, quite surprising seeing as 83 per cent of Pinterest’s US users are women.
However, a closer look at the data reveals that many UK users are in fact professionals working in the media industry. This perhaps explains why the gender split is more even in the UK (44 per cent female, 56 per cent male) compared to the US, where women have adopted the site for social rather than professional reasons.
More at: http://www.thinktank.org.uk/blog/2012/02/uk-pinterest-users-buck-us-trend.php
