A couple of months ago, I was having dinner with two friends and they were discussing this new social media platform – Pinterest – and were encouraging me to join. My friends were very quick to pull out their phones, and show me all the things they had “pinned” over the past couple of days. In a mere 5 minutes, I learned how to make the perfect grilled cheese in conventional toaster oven, received a recipe to make delicious brownies, and found new ways to organize my closet! While I found this all very helpful, I said the last thing I need is to worry about another social media platform.
I finally gave in to the Pinterest craze two weeks ago, and decide to create an account. I was lucky to get an invite from one of my friends, and begun to explore the site. While I have not been “pinning” as much as others, I do find it interesting and fun to search through the site. I have found some great recipes and ideas for my home, but who knows if I will take any of my “pins” and utilize them.
Lastly, the pr person in me was very curious if this is a platform avenue should suggest to my clients. I recently came across data compiled by RJMetrics on Pinterest; here are some of their findings:
- Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history.
- Pins link to a tremendously large universe of sites. Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it only represents about 3% of pins.
- Over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the tremendous virulence at work in the Pinterest community. To contrast, a study done at a similar time in Twitter’s history showed that only about 1.4% of tweets were retweets.
- The quality of the average new user (as defined by their level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high but declining. Users who have joined in recent months are 2-3x less active during their first month than the users that came before them.
In conclusion – I say pin and have your clients pin. This social media platform is not going anywhere and is only going to get bigger!
Happy Pinning!
