Word of Mouth Marketing Through Pinterest

Word of mouth marketing through Pinterest

Pinterest is now the official number 3 US social network, and it seems to still be rising in the number of brands that are planning to use it. Described as a virtual pin board meant to share and organize the things you love, the social network started in 2010 and has become one of the biggest players in the e-commerce world. Its number of users has reached 145% since the beginning of 2012, better than that of Twitter or even Facebook.

ComStore states that online shoppers are 10% more likely to buy if they are referred from Pinterest, making word of mouth marketing one of the best things this network has. Therefore, these shoppers not only spend more, but they also do it on more items and more often than in other social sites.

How is Pinterest useful for your business?

If you are a small business owner or you just want to know how Pinterest can be useful to you, here are some things you should know.

As with most social media networks, one of the things you might do is a campaign. The crucial aspect of any campaign is the analysis, seeing what the results are, what has been good and what can be improved or changed. In order to help you with measuring your results, Pinterest offers some free reporting tools. If you usually would have to pay a great deal of money for these kinds of reports, the free tools available on Pinterest are now doing the job for you, and they're doing it for free.

Here are three of the most useful tools available on Pinterest:

PinReach - also known as PinClout, this tool brings analytics and insights in order to help monitor trends and help you see how successful your Pinterest page is. This tool provides an overall influence score, as well as easy-to-read tables and charts, displaying most popular boards and pins. You can see the top 5 pins and compare them staked up against each other. Details about the most far reaching boards' performance are available. You can also see the number of your pins, re-pins, followers, comments and likes for each one of them, and the page's overall score, otherwise called the total PinReach. Practically, you can see at a glance all your activity, how viral (spread through word of mouth marketing) your pins are, how many people are actually reading, liking, pinning and re-pinning your pins, the boards created, and the ones you are contributing to. It's also easy to learn generally about the Pinterest community, seeing other members that are doing well and learning from their experiences.

Pinerly - this is an analytic tool, promising to make it easy to keep track of likes, click-throughs and re-pins your pins have. This is available for any campaign created on Pinterest. Practically it enables you to see how effective your campaign is, whether your content and efforts are rewarded, and it allows you to optimize your content if and where it is necessary. Each pin used on this website creates a campaign that you can afterword breakdown and analyze with four metrics: likes, pins, re-pins and reach. The tool is particularly useful if you want to know how many times people are making a click through to your link, and is not available with any other Pinterest services. Furthermore, you may receive suggestions of users to follow, or pins to re-pin based on your interests and boards.

Although pretty new and still in testing, this tool is planning to offer more services, like more drilled down analytics and scheduling pins in advance, making it easier for brands to pin at specific moments, when followers are most active.

PinPuff - this calculates the influence you have on Pinterest, providing you with your activity, reach, and viral scores (word of mouth marketing). You can also see a detailed breakdown of the evolution of your top 20 boards. The calculation of your referral traffic and pins is calculated in 3 ways: cost per click, Pin Worth (Gen), Pin Worth (Ecom). The first refers to the measurement of each outward click or traffic referral on your pin. The second one refers to the worthiness of a pin with a non-sales landing page. Finally, the last one represents the worth of a pin that has a landing page wherein a user can purchase something.

Conclusion

Pinterest has had an amazing evolution lately, developing new strategies and offering great tools for you to be able to get your business known online, making it cheaper and available for anyone to have great marketing campaigns. The tools stated above are just some examples of how much social media has evolved, and how important word of mouth marketing is in today's e-commerce world.