Overview of Pinterest as a social networking tool for health care social media. My presentation from the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media Social Media Residency, Rochester, April 2013

1. Pinterest the “Next” New Thing
Farris Timimi, MD
Medical Director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media
April, 2013

2. Agenda
• What is Pinterest
• Why is it an important health care social media
tool
• Discussion

3. What is Pinterest?
• Pinterest is a “pinboard” style social photo sharing
website
• It allows users to create and manage themed image
collections that focus on anything that might catch
their eye

4. How is a bulletin board social?
• Users can browse other pinboards for ideas
• The social interactions focus on “re-pinning” or
“liking” images
• Pins can be shared on Twitter and Facebook
• Over 80% of pins are re-pins

5. Development
• Pinterest started December 2009
• Initially launched as closed beta in March 2010
• Co-founder Ben Silbermann personally wrote
the first 5,000 users, offering them his personal
phone number to trouble shoot any problems

6. Growth
• December 2010-10,000 users.
• January 2012-11.7 million unique U.S. visitors,
making it the fastest site ever to break the 10
million unique visitor ceiling
• That month, Pinterest drove more retail referral
traffic than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+
• March 2012, it passed LinkedIn to become the 3rd
largest social network in the US.

7. Growth
• No PR
• No marketing
• Initially invitation only, open to all August 2012

8. All of this new!
• 2001: Wikipedia
• 2003: MySpace
• 2004: Facebook, flickr
• 2005: YouTube
• 2006: Twitter
• 2007: tumblr.
• 2009: foursquare
• 2011: Pinterest

9. Social Media Greats at the age of 2
• Facebook: 6 million members
• Twitter: 3 million members
• Pinterest: 10.4 million members

10. New Account
• You can open a new account by e-mail, or with a
Facebook or Twitter profile
• When you pin or re-pin an image to your board,
you have the option of sharing the pin with your
Facebook and Twitter followers

11. Structure
• On the main page, pin feed appears, displaying
activity from boards you follow.
• Currently main sections to browse: everything,
popular and gifts.
• The most popular pins are food & drink, DIY &
crafts, and women's apparel.
• When you browse new boards and pins, you can
visit a "Tastemakers" page that recommend
pinboards with content similar to your pins.

12. How do they make money?
• Pinterest replaces affiliate tracking code with their
code; payment is passed to Pinterest instead of
the original affiliate
• In other words, Pinterest gets a portion of the sale
when you buy an item as it links you to
commercial sites
• This may not not add up to a lot of money, as the
majority of posts originate from Tumblr and
Facebook, and are not commercial products

13. How do they make money?
• The real profit may be in affinity data, highlighting
the relationships between consumer behavior and
products, which could be collected and sold as
marketing analysis.

14. Who is on Pinterest?
• Nearly a third of users have an annual household
income of $100,000 or more
• 80% are female
• The largest age demographic represented on the
site are people between 25-34
• 50% have kids
• This is the demographic most valuable to mobile
advertisers -- young, upper-middle class and
female

15. Who is on Pinterest?
• This is also our target demographic-the health
care decision makers in families

16. Who is on Pinterest?

17. Terminology
• Pin: An image added to your Pinterest
board
• It can be a link to a site, or an uploaded
image
• You can add captions or hashtags
• Adding a hashtag makes it easier to Tweet
and optimizes search

18. Terminology
• Repin: Once someone has pinned
something, other users can repin it
• Most pins are repins
• Board: Where your pins live-you can have
different pin boards for different topics
• Pinmarklet: “Once installed in your
browser, the “Pin It” button lets you grab an
image from any website and add it to one of
your pinboards.”

19. How to repin
• If you see something you want to share, hover
your mouse over the content-you can…..
• Comment, Like or Repin it

20. How to repin
• When you click repin, a window will open with
your background still visible

21. How to repin
• Select from the drop down menu which board
you want to pin to. Add a description and
check the box if you want to share the pin on
Facebook/Twitter
• Click repin and done!

22. How to Pin
Pimarklet

23. How to Pin

24. How to Pin

25. Remember the 80s
• 80% of pins are repins-1.4% of tweets are
retweets
• Pinterest 80% female, Twitter-55%, Facebook
55%
• 80% of female general population trust Pinterest,
67% Facebook, 73% Twitter
• Women account for 80% of all household
purchase

26. To start..
• Open a Pinterest account
• Install the Pinmarklet on your browser
• Set up your boards, with brief descriptions
• Pin, repin and explore!
• Be wary of Pinsanity!

27. For Further Interaction:
• http://pinterest.com/farristimimi/