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Marketing Kit
Pinterest

Contents
Introduction
1
Social Media for Beautiful Things: Pinterest Soars
2
What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth
3
Should Marketers Be Pinterested? [Infographic]
6
Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for
Why They Aren’t on Pinterest
7
What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation
9
4 Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention to Pinterest
11
Additional Resources
12

Introduction
In just one glimpse, a picture speaks to our hearts, minds, and imaginations.
Harnessing our fascination with images, Pinterest, a relatively new social network, allows users to display their
favorite pictures and videos for the whole digital world to see and share.
Users create online pinboards on Pinterest and collect images and videos to pin on their boards—much like
old-school bulletin boards. Pinterest makes the process easy for users: A “Pin It” button can be added to users’
Web browsers, allowing them to add to their image collections as they traverse the Internet.
Now, businesses are also using Pinterest to tell their stories via pictures and extend their reach. By pinning
product images, infographics, how-to information, designs, bits of inspiration, and more, businesses are appealing to our proclivity to look when there’s something to see.
Want to know how you can use Pinterest for your business? Check out the articles in this kit. Among the things
you’ll learn:
•
•
•
•
Stats about Pinterest’s meteoric rise and what’s driving its growth
Why marketers should care about Pinterest and its users
The top three excuses for not using Pinterest—and why they’re wrong
The top five reasons to use Pinterest as a marketer
You’ll also find links to additional resources, including online seminars, articles, and a panel discussion.
By the time you reach the end of this collection, you’ll have pinned down the reasons for participating in
Pinterest—and picked up invaluable how-to advice and tips for making Pinterest part of your marketing mix.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
1

Social Media for Beautiful Things:
Pinterest Soars
by By Lenna Garibian, MarketingProfs
Visits to the invitation-only social networking site Pinterest
skyrocketed in the second half of 2011, reaching 11.0 million
as of December 17, up nearly 40 times the level recorded six
months earlier, according to data from Experian Hitwise.
and Texas. But the Social Networking category as a whole
over-indexes on share of visits from Northeastern states
whereas Pinterest over-indexes on visits from the states in the
Northwest and Southeast.
As the name suggests, Pinterest is an online pin board that allows you to “organize and share all the beautiful things you find
on the Web,” according to the company. Such things include
images of food, home décor, clothing, and furniture, which
users “pin” onto their pages.
Moreover, nine of the top 10 over-indexed states for Pinterest
visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category
(versus the online population), which is understandable considering the abundance of crafts content on the website.
The site was recently added to the Top 10 in Hitwise’s Social
Networking Forums category.
Celebs, Brands on Pinterest?
Below, other findings from Experian Hitwise.
Site Demographics
Not surprisingly, visitors to the site in the 12 rolling weeks
ended December 17 skewed female (58%) and between the
age 25 and 44 (59%).
However, Pinterest visitors do have a different geographic
profile compared with their counterparts visiting other social
networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.
Pinterest and the Social Networking Forums category
both attract the greatest share of their visits from California
Pinterest is gaining popularity in the media and among some
brands. The site was recently named to Time Magazine’s Top 50
websites of 2011, alongside Google+, Klout, Quora, and Storify,
in the social media category.
Although personalities such as Kim Kardashian and Lady
Gaga don’t appear to have a presence on Pinterest (there is
currently a waiting list), Paula Deen does have one, with more
than 25,000 followers, 20 bulletin boards (e.g., Game-day Party
Pleasers, Paula’s Picks, and Cupcake Cravings), and more than
440 “pins.”
Martha Stewart has more than 11,000 followers on Pinterest,
while the department store Nordstom has roughly 6,000
followers.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
2

What’s Driving Pinterest’s
Amazing Growth
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.
by Lenna Garibian, MarketingProfs
though almost all Google links point to Google Image Search,
which is technically misattributed content from other domains,
RJMetrics points out.
The following are some of the key findings of the analysis of the
data collected by RJMetrics:
•
Pinterest is retaining and engaging its users 2-3 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 to 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 2009 study by HubSpot.
•
The “quality” of the typical new Pinterest user (quality
is defined by a user’s level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high, albeit declining. Users
who have joined Pinterest in recent months are 2-3
times less active during their first month than users
who joined before them.
Below, detailed findings from the RJMetrics report titled
“Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look.”
Flickr (2.5%), Tumblr (1.1%), and weheartit (1.0%) round out
the top 5, after which no domain accounts for 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.
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,
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
3

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth
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 relatively low proportion of pins originate from
pinmarklet, a browser bookmarklet that allows users to pin
content from any website via one click.
User Engagement: Cohort Analysis
Cohort Analysis is a tool that allows marketers to study different
groups of users at identical points in time in their lifecycles,
regardless of when they actually joined the site.
In the following chart, each line represents a cohort, or a
segment of users who made their first pin in a specific month.
For example, the June 2011 cohort consists of users who made
their first pin in June 2011. The line itself shows the “average
cumulative pins made per cohort member.” So, the “Month 1”
data-point for the June 2011 cohort shows us how many items
were pinned in June 2011 among users who joined in June
2011. The “Month 2” data-point on that same line shows how
many pins were made by the typical user in that cohort by the
end of July 2011, and so forth.
Among most companies, even highly successful ones, similar
cohort analyses show lines that steadily decay toward a more
horizontal slope over time, RJMetrics points out. The effect
occurs because there is some natural attrition, causing the
incremental engagement of the typical user to drop off.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case with Pinterest. Instead,
the lines show little to no decay. Their slopes remain consistent,
indicating a net attrition rate of close to 0%.
Why no decay in engagement? The reason, according to the
study, is possibly one of two factors: (1) no one who starts using
Pinterest ever stops; or, more likely (2) users who continue to
use Pinterest become so much more engaged over time that
their activities fully make up for those users who quit the site.
To explore the issue further, RJMetrics broke out the data on
a weekly basis for the eight weeks ended December 18, 2011.
The analysis found that between 40% and 60% of unique users
were still actively returning back to the site to pin again in each
of the first eight weeks of their life cycle. Although that may
seem like a steep drop-off, the results are exceptionally strong,
particularly for a consumer Internet business, RJMetrics notes.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
4

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth
By contrast, when Twitter was at a similar point in its life cycle
(late 2009), Twitter’s decay rate was twice that of Pinterest,
with user activity (measured by tweets) rapidly plummeting to
roughly 20% before stabilizing, according to a 2009 analysis of
Twitter by RJMetrics, published by Techcrunch.
Growing Pains: Quality Decay
Among most fast-growing consumer startups, however, an
increase in media coverage inevitably drives a big spike in the
number of registered users and a drop-off in the quality of the
typical user, RJMetrics points out. (Similarly, quality is defined
in the study by levels of engagement and likelihood to remain
active.)
The drop is likely caused by flocks of curious onlookers who
are outside of Pinterest’s core audience; although registering
accounts, they are failing to become engaged.
Growth Stats
To put the RJMetrics research in context, it’s interesting to
note Pinterest’s growth trends, particularly over the past six
months. The following are some key Pinterest stats, according
to separate research from Compete:
Pinterest attracted 11,140,641 unique visitors to the
site on January 20, 2011, up 815% from 1,217,935
visitors six months earlier.
•
Pinterest is no exception to that rule. The following chart
shows how the typical new user who has joined Pinterest in
November and December 2011 is using the site far less than
their counterparts from previous months.
•
On a monthly basis, the number of unique visitors to
Pinterest grew 54.6% in January over mid-December
levels.
•
Over the past six months, traffic growth has averaged
63.7% month over month.
•
Ranked by numbers of unique visitors, Pinterest was
No. 119 in January by Compete, up 87 spots from No.
206 one month earlier.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
5

Should Marketers Be Pinterested?
[Infographic]
When the time came to consider whether Pinterest was a good
fit for the MarketingProfs brand, we had to consider a few factors:
•
•
•
•
What goal can it accomplish?
How do we measure success?
Who will manage it?
What added value does it provide over other social
networks?
by Corey O’Loughlin, MarketingProfs
3. To be successful on Pinterest, you should promote a
lifestyle (broadly speaking).
To follow the MarketingProfs boards, click on over to our
Pinterest account.
Because Pinterest is becoming an increasingly important
channel for marketers, we though it only right to take a stab at
it ourselves:
•
•
•
•
Our goal? Branding/awareness of free (“Basic”)
MarketingProfs membership.
Measuring success? All shared links are tracked with
Google Analytics to test conversions and referral
traffic.
Who will do it? The great thing about Pinterest is that
you can divide the work by assigning contributors, so
we chose four team members across the marketing
and content teams.
What’s the added value? We think it allows us a new
way to tell our story—how MarketingProfs views
and loves marketing—a story that isn’t as easily told
elsewhere.
I’ll admit it. It’s been fun, really fun—and we are tracking nicely
toward our success metrics.
But like all new things, we have to take a step back and analyze
whether this channel is really an effective one for marketers
everywhere.
Here’s the good news: Monetate, a company that provides marketing agility products and expert optimization resources, has
done the digging for us and packaged it nicely in an infographic. Here are my top three takeaways from that infographic:
1. Pinterest is driving more traffic than Google+.
2. Pinterest’s unique visitors increased 329% from
September to December 2011.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
6

Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop
Making for Why They Aren’t on Pinterest
If you went to your CMO and said, “I want to allocate time to
a website that is primarily used by furniture restoration geeks
and women designing their dream wedding,” what kind of
response would you expect?
Now, if you went to that same CMO and said, “I want to investigate a new social platform that’s driving more referrals than
Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined,” how do you think
that would go over?
The problem is that B2B marketers too often think about
Pinterest in terms of the former approach. But that type of
reasoning holds B2B marketers back from exploring the most
exciting platforms in their early days.
by Jesse Noyes, Eloqua
1. “It’s not our audience.”
This is perhaps the most common excuse B2B marketers give
for skipping out on just about any social platform. It’s the same
argument you likely heard about Facebook, or even Twitter, in
their early days.
At this point, Pinterest is dominated by links to mid-century
lamps and Etsy projects (it skews toward women and the
25-44 age group). But as awareness grows at a rapid clip,
people with business interests are going to jump in. (In fact,
it’s already happening.) Saying it’s just for knitters is like saying Tumblr is just for hipsters. (Check out the MarketingProfs
Pinterest account here.)
For the uninitiated, Pinterest is the still “invitation-only” social
bookmarking site where people can display their interests in
a highly visual way. Users “pin” various pages from the Web to
their “boards,” which are self-organized by category.
Today, Pinterest is most heavily used for topics such as fashion,
furniture, and food. But here are the facts that make Pinterest
compelling for B2B marketing:
•
Pinterest’s visitor traffic rose to 11 million visits in
December, 40 times what it was six months before.
•
It accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic in January, on
par with Twitter.
•
It’s sticky, with users spending an average of 88.3
minutes on the site, ranking behind only Facebook
and Tumblr among the top social networks.
You’d think that with trends like that... Pinterest should be making marketers of all stripes drool. But many aren’t.
Here are three excuses you might hear from B2B marketers for
avoiding Pinterest—and why they’re wrong.
2. “Pinterest is purely visual.”
B2B marketing is prone to spreadsheets and verbose product
spec sheets. So where does our text-heavy marketing fit on
Pinterest?
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
7

Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for Why They Aren’t on Pinterest
It doesn’t. But a picture’s worth a thousand slogans. Our content is becoming more aesthetically driven as the competition
for attention heats up.
Pinterest is a great way to attract people to your words by
highlighting your images. (For a prime example, check out Joe
Chernov’s “Infographics” board.)
By getting involved with the Pinterest community now, you’ll
be more likely to become a power user when opportunities like
brand pages and ads open up.
3. “Pinterest doesn’t have brand pages.”
No, it doesn’t. And that may be the best reason to join.
If history is any indicator, social networks don’t hook a rabid fan
base by offering brand pages. As Pinterest grows organically,
the time to build your personal brand is now.
Remember: Pinterest is novel, but it isn’t new. It works much like the
bookmarking services we know (think StumbleUpon or Reddit)—
only more visually enticing. You can pin charts, infographics,
slideshows, ebooks, and more. (As an example, I started boards for
“Good Content Marketing” and Eloqua’s “Chart of the Week” series.)
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
8

What Pinterest Teaches Us About
Innovation
Innovations from businesses are continually changing our
world via new products and customer experiences. But anyone
who has ever been locked in a brainstorming session knows
that the hard part is the process that leads to the innovation.
True innovation is difficult to generate and even harder to repeat.
That scarcity of inspiration is what drives companies to look for new
and interesting ways to acquire it.
Pinterest, a relatively new social network, provides a refreshing
perspective on the pursuit of inspiration. Quickly becoming
one of the more addictive sites on the Web, Pinterest is a global
bulletin board for images that inspire, trigger laughter, or
amuse... because they are just plain cool.
Members can post images of virtually anything, categorize
them for easy reference, and create their own pinboards that
contain other images of interest to them. Some of us have “lost”
loved ones to Facebook or reality TV; it’s a good bet that within
the next year you will “lose” a loved one to Pinterest.
People use Pinterest for more reasons that I can fathom, but
what struck me instantly was the spirit of innovation within
the posted images. Some images show a creative combination
of concepts that aren’t typically associated with one another.
For example, this image merges a staircase and a bookshelf by
turning each step into a shelf of books.
The collection of such images, when viewed together on a page,
starts to form a neural network of interconnected and inspirational ideas.
Three Innovation Lessons
So, what can your business learn from Pinterest? Here are
three key lessons about innovating that businesses can borrow from Pinterest.
by Chad McCloud, Jabian Consulting
1. Make innovation a visual experience.
Traditional brainstorming sessions use whiteboards to capture
ideas with words, but the use of images and videos brings
something much more sensory.
For example, a product manager for a software company might
view a visually appealing trend graphic from Mint.com and
find an applicable enhancement to her own product—via a
much more interesting medium than a verbal description of
enhanced reporting.
2. Participation breeds innovation.
As Thomas Edison quipped, “To have a great idea, have a lot
of them.” When more than 4 million people use Pinterest to
post ideas, you’re bound to find some pretty amazing doses
of inspiration. The site makes it uncommonly easy for millions
of members to pin, search, and browse through volumes of
content quickly.
Just think about what could be possible if businesses were to
expand innovation efforts across the entire company, or even
to customers.
3. Quick! Innovate in the next 10 minutes!
Many of us have a hard time innovating when our time for
innovation is locked in a schedule between 9 AM and 10 AM
on Tuesday. If your best ideas come while using the treadmill,
showering, or enjoying a cup of coffee on Saturday morning,
then a place to post ideas allows innovation to occur beyond
calendar and time constraints. Pinterest does that exceedingly well.
Expanding the number of ideas, however, will take businesses
only so far. Companies that are famous for innovation use
structured approaches to channel their inspirations into new
products and experiences that generate real revenue.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
9

What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation
Structure for Maximum Impact
Here are three structural steps that can maximize the impact of
those three lessons Pinterest teaches us.
1. Start with a goal.
Pinterest members use the site for everything from collecting
and expressing their own styles to finding sources of good
ideas. Business innovation works only when a defined goal is
combined with facilitation toward that goal. Examples of goals
include generating new product ideas and enhancing current
ones, or creating different ways to search, catalog, and connect.
2. Inspire innovation by building upon the ‘known.’
Most people have a hard time generating inspiring ideas out of
thin air. When presented with a tangible idea, however, many of
us can build upon that idea and take it a few steps further... or
in a new direction entirely.
Connections are made when you associate two ideas that
seemingly don’t have anything to do with each other.
Thermostats and iPods perform completely separate functions,
but when brought together they help inspire products such as
the Nest self-programming home thermostat.
3. Encourage collaboration on top of affirmation
Many of the comments on Pinterest are affirmative (e.g., “I
like it!”). Though positive feedback encourages participation,
encouraging collaboration among the innovators can iteratively
lead to improvisational (yet critical) steps toward a breakthrough idea.
Facilitators who draw out and link ideas via contiguity and contrast help focus the chaos of creativity into applied solutions.
As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.”
***
Companies that infuse some of the lessons from Pinterest into
their own innovation efforts are bound to find ideas that they
never dreamed possible. At the very least, they’ll walk away
with new visions for remodeling the kitchen.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
10

4 Reasons Marketers Should Pay
Attention to Pinterest
Let’s not beat around the bush, by now you’ve heard of
Pinterest and are wondering if it’s worth your time and effort
to start yet another social presence. While it probably isn’t right
for all brands, here are four things you should know about
Pinterest:
1. Pinterest is driving serious referral traffic.
Pinterest’s popularity is soaring and as a result, Pinterest users
are driving serious traffic to websites. According to data from
late January 2012, Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than
Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. Take a minute to
digest that. Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Combined! That’s
a lot of referral traffic and figures like that shouldn’t be ignored.
2. Pinterest users are highly engaged.
Pinterest’s user base has grown exponentially and traffic to the
site has increased 40x in the last six months. There are more
than 10.4 million registered users, and the Pinterest traffic
graphs look like the mythical growth charts you see in clip art.
Potential users can remain on a waitlist for over a week to be
admitted to the site and are clamoring to get in. Not only are
users banging at the gates, once they are in, they are spending an average of 98 minutes per month on the site and daily
use of the site increased more than 145% since the start of
2012. Pinterest is growing at a rapid rate and attracting a very
engaged user base.
by Corey O’Loughlin, MarketingProfs
4. Pinterest can help humanize your brand.
To most of your clients and prospects, your company is a thing,
a logo, a service—Pinterest gives you the chance to humanize your brand through Boards that reflect your culture, your
employees, and your values. Sure, you can humanize your
brand in other places, like your Facebook page or on Twitter,
but Pinterest lends you the unique opportunity to display the
“WHO” of your company right next to the “WHAT.” Is your brand
committed to giving back to charity? Pin blog posts about your
work using a great picture. Are your employees part of an intermural sports team or athletic league? Start a Board chronicling
their athletic prowess. Does your office welcome furry friends?
Pin those puppies right up, you can humanize with animals too!
Is Pinterest right for your brand? Pinterest, like all social media
sites, is just a means to an end—you need to look at what you
are trying to achieve with your marketing programs before
you can determine if Pinterest is an appropriate tool for you.
In 2012, the demographics of Pinterest users and their pinning
habits and interests may change. So even if you determine that
Pinterest isn’t right for you now—keep an eye on it, it may be
right later.
3. Pinterest can be good for your SEO.
Pinterest is a massive social network with great domain authority. It is indexed frequently by search engines and there are SEO
opportunities in how you name and describe your Boards. You
can (and should) create descriptions of your Boards and of the
content you pin in alignment with your keyword strategy (don’t
name boards “Great Stuff” or “Things I Like” or forget to add a
description with SEO value). There are great backlink possibilities too—the easier you make it for people to pin your content,
the better.
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
11

Additional Resources
Panel Discussion: The Rise of Pinterest in B2B
Post: http://www.focus.com/roundtables/rise-pinterest-b2b/
Audio file: https://www.hidefcorporate.com/wav/rec/30/conf50230_11379910.mp3
Online Seminar: The Rising Power of Visual Content on Social Networks (March 12, 2012)
http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/482
Online Seminar: How to Select Images That Make Your Marketing More Effective (a Take 10 webcast)
http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/400
How-To Article: How to Evolve Your B2B Customer Experience Using Images
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2011/5435/how-to-evolve-your-b2b-customer-experience-using-images
Short Article: How to Choose Stock Images for Your Email Campaigns
http://www.marketingprofs.com/short-articles/2491/how-to-choose-stock-images-for-your-email-campaigns
Slide Show: Top 12 Overused Stock Photos
http://www.marketingprofs.com/pics/2011/5542/top-12-overused-stock-photos-slide-show
©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved.
12