2012 confirms a new major player in the social media space.
Pinterest is the freshly popular photo sharing social network. The New York venture capital-funded networking website attracted a staggering 18.7 million visitors in March this year. The website has significantly snowballed its delicately created December 2009 market pinholes into a now largely defined, innovative and visual enthusiast targeted marketplace gap.
Pinterest is officially the 3rd largest social networking site in the world and is currently sprinting ahead of both LinkedIn and Tagged for social media market share – bronze in the build up to the 2012 London Olympics. Now partnering with market leaders Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest indeed reveals exciting times to come for the world of digital branding.
So: what is Pinterest? Pinterest allows users to create theme based image collections ranging from events, hobbies, shopping ideas, latest fashions and many more. The concept is minimalistically effective. It follows in Facebook’s footsteps in that users can follow chosen user content (this time in the form of pinboards). Account holders can pin images on their own themed boards, “re-pin” other user images and can even pin images directly from the net with Pinterest automatically crediting the copyright holder. The platforms interaction with Facebook allows users to reflect opinions through a mirrored “like” and “comment” system. Enthusiastic news sharers can also tweet inspirational pinboard content.
With facts visualised, let’s answer the important question: how can this benefit your businesses digital branding campaign? In short, Pinterest allows businesses to boast its strategic imagery to enthusiasts.
We cannot express that term’s importance enough: categorically driven enthusiasts is what the experience is all about.
As the company explains, “Pinterest is creating sort of a meritocracy of what’s visually appealing”. Some contextualised examples you say? Take these: an online retail outlet can publish interesting and pioneering stock pictures which will evidently be picked up by target market enthusiast pinboard followers.
The site allows price tagging which also allocates items into gift idea sections listed by expense for users. Fashion companies are in their element with a confirmed US marketplace of 84% female users, and are enjoying the online Youtube-like viral effects that their design innovations are creating. Technology companies are using the website to leak advancing innovations to the forever valuable word-spreading geeks of tech culture.
Pinterest is giving businesses the opportunity to directly portray their brand’s visual personality to very appropriate customer bases within a highly efficient social networking platform. The firm said it best themselves in a recent New York Times write up, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.