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Posted on by Ruby Lowe

Stranger Pins: Why Pinterest is the dark horse of social

Pinterest is a polarizing platform. You either love it, loath it, or have never heard of it. It’s the go-to place for yummy mummies and crafters. It’s the slightly less cool version of Instagram, a place to collate ideas and plan for the future.

But why on earth has Pinterest got such a bad rep, between brands and consumers alike? For brands, it seems like quite a lot of work for little ROI, and for consumers, it appears that there are just too many other platforms with better features for them to use.

It’s interesting that people are so confounded by Pinterest. It has a whole host of features, which newer platforms are now introducing as their own. HelloOo, Pinterest did it first!

 

The guilty pleasure platform.

 

Pinterest is a guilty pleasure platform. It’s incredibly self-centred and the whole idea of the platform revolves around you, pinning things that you like. It’s not for anyone else – the only reason people follow you is because they like what YOU like. And vice versa.

Pinterest never got its big break – there was no incremental moment in its lifetime that grabbed people’s attention. It has just existed and continues to exist, without causing too much fuss.

 

But pay attention to Pinterest.

  • 175 million active monthly users
  • Second largest social referrer of web traffic behind Facebook
  • 93% of Pinterest users said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest.
  • More than 14 million articles are pinned each day

 

Pinterest best features

People use to plan

Pinterest is the place people use to plan: weddings, parties or how they’re going to get their haircut. If your brand fits in well with a particular lifestage or planning stage, Pinterest is the ideal place to set up.

Buy a pin!

There’s an option on Pinterest to create ‘buy it now’ buttons – do you can purchase straight from the platform! This is fantastic for clothing brands and online retailers. And Instagram thought they did it first? Oh hell no!

Dark social sharing

Pinterest gives you the options to share with your friends on ‘dark social’. With sharing on dark social on the up, it’s crucial that platforms give the option to do this.

Chrome

Pinterest has an excellent Chrome extension, which allows you to quickly pin any webpage on any site with the click of a button.

 

Was Pinterest before its time?

Visual – Platforms are becoming more and more visual. The introduction of Snapchat style stories on practically all platforms demonstrated this.

Archiving – A feature was recently released on Instagram which let you save other people’s photos into ‘Collections’. Sound familiar? Cough, Pinterest board, cough.

Click-throughs – Pinterest is the second largest social referral of traffic behind Facebook. Is Instagram missing a trick here? Do they need to allow more links in the platform?

 

Get on Pinterest

If your brand is having success on other visual platforms, it’s worth giving Pinterest a go. As well as being able to post the highly visual content that you would on Instagram or Snapchat, you can also expect higher traffic to your site.

By Ruby Lowe

 

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