Pinterest is the platform everyone in the office is suddenly asking about. It’s still invite-only, which somehow makes people want it more, and the growth this year has been startling. For most of the ecommerce people I talk to the question is a simple one: is this worth any of my time, or is it a fad for wedding planners?
My answer, for now, is that it depends almost entirely on what you sell.
Pinterest is intensely visual and heavily skewed towards a particular audience; overwhelmingly women, a lot of US traffic, and interests that cluster around food, fashion, home, crafts and weddings. Sell things that photograph beautifully and get bought on inspiration, and this could be one of the best referral sources you’re currently ignoring. Sell industrial fixings or accountancy software, and you can close the tab and get on with your day.
The bit that’s caught my attention is the referral traffic. A Facebook like sits there and does nothing for you. A pin carries a link back to the source, and it keeps carrying it. Someone pins a product, someone else repins it, and months later that pin is still sending people to a product page. In analytics it shows up as a slowly growing trickle rather than a spike, which is unusual and rather pleasing to watch.
A few practical things if you want to try it:
- Put a “Pin It” button on your product pages, so it’s trivial for a visitor to pin your image rather than someone else’s screenshot of it.
- Get your image dimensions right. Tall, portrait images do far better than wide ones; the layout rewards height.
- Fill in the description and the price. Pinterest picks these up, and a pin with a price on it behaves a little like a shop window.
- Don’t just pin your own catalogue. An account that’s nothing but “buy my stuff” gets no traction. Curate things your customer would actually want on their board, and let your products sit among them.
I’d keep it in proportion, mind. The audience is real but narrow, the tracking is primitive, and the whole thing could look very different in a year. For the right sort of shop, though, an hour a week pinning good images is cheap for the traffic it’s starting to send. I’ve told the more sceptical clients to at least claim their name and watch what people pin from their site unprompted; that alone tells you whether it’s worth more.
