It seems, very suddenly, that the Holidays are just around the corner. Has this caught anybody else slightly off-guard?
Have you started ramping up your social media efforts for the holiday season? Have you slapped a few snowmen on your homepage and started pushing stocking-stuffers on Facebook?
This article might cause a slight re-evaluation of where you should be putting your energy in the run-up to that all-important holiday for online sales. I’ll be discussing the influence of Pinterest this holiday season, and how a recent study has changed the way we’re doing business online.
Earlier this month, Piqora published an 8 month study in which they analyzed 1000 brands on Pinterest. Let’s break down their findings:
1. Each Pinterest pin is worth about 78 cents in real-world sales (up 25% from 4th quarter 2012)
This means your Pinterest ROI is very possibly much higher than it is for Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media platform you’re devoting hours of your day to.
It means, in short, that the image below, of a ‘shabby-chic-victorian-garden-collage-hair-comb’ is worth about 380 dollars to e-commerce site Etsy.
Why, how, wait, what? How can a simple action like ‘pinning’ an image translate to real world sales of, what’d you say, more than a quarter of a dollar?
It’s because Pinterest is the platform for some businesses. If your business matches up, you’re tapping into a user-base who’s less and less there for the social aspect and increasingly there to get ideas for what to buy.
Once again, this is primarily if your business’ profile matches up with Pinterest’s user base (who are approximately 80% female, by the way).
2. Each pin drives, on average, two website visits and six page-views
If you put time and effort into Pinterest this holiday season, posting five images a day for 30 days, you’ll be driving 300 qualified, interested leads to your website. Multiply that by average purchase, and you could be seeing thousands of dollars of increased revenue.
This is especially interesting given that last year jewellery retailer Boticca found that Pinterest traffic to their website spent, on average, more than twice as much as traffic from Facebook ($180 vs $85). And Sephora went further, saying Pinterest users spent 15x as much as Facebook users.
3. Each pin is repinned about 10 times, making them 100x more viral than a Tweet
This means brand awareness. It means that even if your pin doesn’t generate a sale, it generates more of a brand profile increase than any other social endorsement.
Pinning intelligently, actively, and creatively increases your brand reputation. The right pins (even if they’re not driving traffic directly to your online shopping cart) increase the chance that when someone thinks of your industry, they’ll think of your brand.
The average Tweet is retweeted 1.4% of the time. You might say, ‘but, James, that Retweet is seen by all of that person’s Twitter Followers,’ and you’d be correct. But a Tweet doesn’t relate to a possible sale. 59% of Twitter users haven’t bought a product they saw on the site, as is the case with Pinterest users.
Pinterest pins increase brand awareness and drive interested traffic to your site at the same time. A win/win if I ever saw one.
Pro Tip: You want to be seen as much as possible on Pinterest, to push that 10 average repins upward. This means maximizing your Pinterest brand for search, or Pinterest SEO. First, optimize your business name for length, then include keywords in your ‘about’ section and on your boards as well as in your board and pin descriptions.
4. The shelf-life of a Pin is much longer than any other social endorsement – with half of all site visits occurring at least 3 and a half months after the initial pin
Pinterest isn’t set up the same as Google search, in which you type in a query and Google spits out a few hundred pages of relevant findings. With Google, if a user hasn’t found what they’re looking for in the first page (if not the first few links) then they’ll assume they erred in their search and start over again.
With Pinterest, users simply keep scrolling (as the page is neverending). This means your pins/products are being interacted with based on their appealing nature (and some keyword optimization), not a complicated series of link-building, Pagerank or an Alexa score.
What kind of life expectancy are you getting for your average Tweet or Facebook Post? 5 minutes for a Tweet (tops) and what, about a day or two for a solid Facebook Post?
For example, let’s say someone types in ‘present ideas for men’ in Pinterest’s search (and believe, me, they will). Because Pinterest’s algorithm is almost completely un-anticipatable, your product will get engagement if it matches those keywords and is awesome. That’s it. Those are the only requirements.
Which, to be honest with you, is kind of refreshing.
5. Brands with rich pin integration have a 82% higher repin to pin ratio than normal pins
If you’re not familiar with rich pins, I’ll quickly break it down for you:
Rich pins are brand pins with more information than the normal images on Pinterest. There’s movie, recipe, article, product, and place pins – all of which offer different advantages for your business. For ecommerce businesses, you’ll be most interested in product pins, which include more business links, the price, availability, and where you can purchase the item.
And, given that rich pins have an 82% higher chance of being repinned than basic pins, you’re looking at more people seeing more of your products on Pinterest, with the information you want to communicate most right there.
Also remember, 70% of Pinterest users use the platform to get inspiration on what to buy (compared to 17% on Facebook). So if your product is desirable and the price and availability are evident, who knows what kind of response you could get this holiday season?
Pro Tip: Pinterest users who pin a rich-product pin are automatically notified when that product goes on sale. This increases the shelf-life of your rich pins even further than normal, as your discount will be automatically advertised to interested users.
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve been inspired to devote more of your time and energy into Pinterest in the run-up to the holidays. The rewards could surprise you.
Have you experimented with Pinterest for holiday promotion before? What were your results? Start the conversation below!