Each quarter Snoo.ws tackles a new series topic to provide our audience with insight, intelligence, examples and ideas. This month is Monitoring Month where we will cover everything from basic monitoring 101 to the top monitoring tools to monitoring's role in your overall strategy. So, stay tuned – there's plenty to come.
Over the past few months, the visual photo-sharing platform Pinterest has gone from relative obscurity to a major social media platform. By now, many brands have started their own Pinterest accounts and have begun to creating their own boards for pinning their products. While having an active presence on Pinterest is important, it is equally important to start monitoring Pinterest for trends that your brand can use to its advantage. Many brands might be thinking "Why should I care what is popular on Pinterest?" or "Why should I interact with Pinterest influencers?". The answer to these questions can be easily answered by referring to the demographics of Pinterest users. Average Pinterest users fall into the "sweet spot" of most brands' target markets: 25-45 years old (53% of users), household income of $50,000-75,000 (31% of users), 80% female, and 60% are college educated. Finding out what is popular among this group of people could greatly help brands gain insight into what is popular among the majority of their customers. [1]
While there exist many advantages to monitoring Pinterest, here are three reasons that every brand should start monitoring:
1. Monitoring Pinterest for pins from your site can provide insight into customer preferences.
Brands can easily see what pins originated from their site by using the following web address, and just adding in their brand's URL:
https://pinterest.com/source/URL
In addition, brands can use the search function to find pins relating to their site.
Once a brand has found their pins on Pinterest, they can start to get a sense of which products are most popular among users. This knowledge can not only help brands know what to post on Pinterest, but also what to post to other social media platforms. If its popular on Pinterest, chances are the rest of your customers will like it as well.
To illustrate how this first type of monitoring would work, take "The Gap" for example. The Gap is interested in seeing which of their products are really popular with the Pinterest crowd. Using their personal URL "https://pinterest.com/source/gap.com", and a manual search of "gap", a list of Gap related pins are shown. By scanning through a few of the pins, Gap will eventually find pins with multiple likes, comments, and repins, like the picture below.
After finding this pin, which has 16 likes, 3 comments , and 90 repins Gap can use this knowledge to help create their pins, tweets, and Facebook updates that receive a good deal of attention and engagement.
2. Monitoring can help brands find Pinterest influencers
By monitoring Pinterest, brands can easily identify influencers, both in their industry and for their products. If approached correctly, brands can engage with influencers and include them in interesting campaigns that benefit both the brand and the influencer. At the very least, brands can give influencers exclusive photos of products to share on Pinterest, which will help increase brand awareness, and will gain the influencer more followers and repins. A more detailed campaign could involve actually sending products to influencers with the goal of them pinning pictures to Pinterest.
(For a great example of this, see what Kotex recently did: http://youtu.be/UVCoM4ao2Tw)
The idea is to reward influencers for being influential. By establishing relationships with influencers, brands can hope to receive more attention from them, increasing the awareness of the brand and its products (which will ultimately lead to more conversions.)
3. Pinterest monitoring can be used to identify industry trends
Just as brands can use Pinterest to identify trends within their own products, they can use Pinterest to identify trends within their industry. Either by using a simple search, or using the predefined categories that Pinterest offers, brands can gain a lot of insight into what is popular on Pinterest. For example, a food brand such as Nutella can easily see that there is one recipe in particular that is popular among Pinterest users. A search for "Nutella" shows that a recipe for Nutella cupcakes is extremely popular on Pinterest.
Nutella can then use this information in a number of ways. Nutella could Tweet about the cupcakes, make a Facebook update about the recipe, create a video showing users how to make them, or even go as far as including this recipe on Nutella labels.
Monitoring Pinterest can open up a whole new door of possibilities for any brand. Brands become smarter with each new insight they gain from monitoring, and this insight can extend far beyond Pinterest. It's still very early in the Pinterest game, so get started today and jump ahead of the competition!
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