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The Importance of Pinterest in Online Marketing

There's a new marketing powerhouse in town: Pinterest. If you haven't heard of it yet, it's an image sharing board, and is currently the fastest website to ever break the 10 million unique visitor mark. The community is largely female-dominant (in 2012, 83% of U.S. users were women), however, so not everybody will be able to successfully market there.

The site is based around user-made boards that they "pin" content to. The content is generally high-quality, aesthetically-pleasing images. Some popular categories on Pinterest include food, interior design, fashion, and crafts. When a user sees a pin that they like, they can choose to "re-pin" it to one of their boards, and everybody following that user will then be able to see it as well.

Working at a Missouri SEO firm, I have a few clients that I feel fall into this niche market. 


With some original content and Google analytics, I decided to do some research. I chose four images that I felt would appeal to Pinterest and posted them on a board. Keep in mind, I currently have no followers on Pinterest, and somebody with a large fan-base would be far more successful.

When you share an image on Pinterest, the image links back to the site it was originally hosted on, so it's great for sharing original content from your website. The first three pictures I posted failed to generate any traffic. However, the fourth image received over 100 re-pins in a matter of a few hours. I repeated this test a few more times and came up with some interesting data.

For every 100 re-pins an image received, my website would see about 16 unique visitors. While this may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that popular pins can receive multiple thousands of re-pins, and creating a pin takes virtually no time at all (in theory) and is completely free.

This also tells me that there are at least some users interested in where the content originated. Convincing other users to feel the same may just be as simple as creating some incentive in the image itself (ie: Click here for more details!).

So, if you're trying to market something that you think Pinterest would enjoy, I suggest giving it a try. Etsy stores have been getting a lot of success from it.

I plan to learn more about pinterest in the near future, so stay tuned!


Article Source: Jonathan J Turner

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