Pinterest for Business

Pinterest, once classed as the third most popular social network in the US, is a visual social network for 'pinning' images and videos to users' own or other pin boards (which are collections of 'pins' usually with a common theme).  The social network encourages it's users to download a "pin it" button on their computers, so that they can share/pin any images/videos they find on the web, that they want to share. The pinners/users distribute your content for you, by repinning, liking and sharing.

Find out more about the social network over at our: Introduction to Pinterest Blog published in February 2012 and our Utilising Pinterest for Brands and Business Blog published in March 2012. 

In November 2012 Pinterest launched brand pages for businesses. After being active on Pinterest, the social network will allow you to advertise your website address (top level domains only), so that the users of Pinterest can find out more about you.  Once verified, you will receive a 'tick of authority' next to the website name.  

Via a business's landing page Pinterest are helping businesses get the most out of their network by providing advice on how businesses can use the network to:

• Tell their story
• Build a community
• Send traffic to the website
• Identify what is working well and how to develop further.

Find a useful 'pin board' of Brands and Businesses using Pinterest here:

http://pinterest.com/mshahab/brands-businesses-blogs-on-pinterest/

The above image is from a recent Pinterest Christmas campaign from Joules Clothing.  They invited Joules Clothing fans to Pin 5 items that they would love to get to Christmas, on their boards and email notify them via email of their Pinterest Board URL.  The campaign was integrated with Facebook, with a custom Pinterest tab.

The benefits of the Pinterest campaign to the brand include:

• Organic sharing of their products around Xmas time.
• Profiling the brand to a creative community which suits their target market
• Increased traffic to the website on product pages.  
• Gain increased followers on company Pinterest board and Facebook for further campaigns.

The Flashlight Search Marketing team are briefing a number of clients on how to use this social network for business growth, with focus on campaign integration.  

If you require any assistance learning how this social network can benefit your business, visit the links listed above and should you require further assistance talk to our sales team.

Author: Sarah Griffiths (AKA Pinterest Addict)

2012 Social Media Startups

Hot on the coat tails of social media’s current love affair with Pinterest, come a handful of start ups that have all kicked off in 2012. Some less subtle then others! Let’s take a quick look at just a handful of them.

“Social Travel” has been growing in leaps and bounds. As everything seems to follow Pinterest in trending towards more visual approaches to content; we’re seeing a lot of similarly styled sites popping up.

Trippy recently redesigned its site to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. Users can now create travel boards and can pin images to them, comment, and also choose to tag their images with “Want to go” or “been there”.

Though originally launched some 3 years ago, just earlier this month, the visual-travel-discovery site, Wanderfly, redesigned and re launched their site. Gtrot, another social travel site has also opted for a more visual focused design update, with similar photo uploading and recommendations.

Now moving away from travel and more to commerce, Fancy can be described as a Pinterest catering for ecommerce merchants, facilitating ecommerce in two ways;

• The majority of items pinned on Fancy come straight from ecommerce stores, so a ‘Buy it’ button takes users straight to the merchant's page

• Users can also purchase items directly from the Fancy site, involving merchants more directly in the process. This requires merchants to find items that users have fancied, when they find something that they stock the merchant can place a bid to sell that particular item, through Fancy, by using the ‘I want to sell it’ button.

Pingram.me sells itself as a mash up of Instagram and Pinterest, though you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference between it and the latter of those two at a glance. The major difference between the two is that pinning on Pingram is only enabled on photos taken by other Pingram users. This approach is intended to both respect Pinterest etiquette and protect other Instagram users from having their images shared unknowingly.

Now moving momentarily back to the world of Social Travel, but refreshingly un-Pinterest like, we have this new site, Tripbirds. Rather than relying on friends to create content, Tripbirds instead organises geotagged content from other friends on different platforms, which at the moment includes popular media such as Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram.

Mashable has kindly outlined ‘9 social networks to watch’; such as Path, Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, Glancee, Localmind, Forecast, Gogobot and Fancy which we mentioned above. All these social networks are trying to win an audience over from Facebook, yet trying not to become too similar to Facebook; which already offers some very similar features to these new start-ups and has the added bonus of being used by many of the businesses we work with and certainly all our friends.

Of course, whilst spreading your influence is important, getting on board every social media fad that pops up isn’t a constructive use of time and effort. If you’re interested in investing into social media and discovering where to focus your efforts, why not get in contact with Rocktime and talk to our Flashlight team about discovering a Social media strategy tailored for you.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Utilising Pinterest for Brands and Business

As a business you may want to encourage engagement, either through visitors stumbling across your own Pinterest board, or allowing visitors to pin your content to their boards. Both of these are easily done through the lines of buttons under the images on Pinterest, similar to Facebook’s approach with their Like/Share buttons.

In order to facilitate this, the Pinterest site offers both a “Follow Button” and a “Pin it” button that can easily be incorporated into sites. You can even install a "Pin it" button into your browser bar or download the Pinterest App for iOS.

All this has lead to some very popular Pinterest boards and users, attracting thousands of views and followers. Back in February, Mashable & Zoomsphere looked into the top followed Pinterest brands. At the time the most popular board on Pinterest is The Perfect Palette, a blog focusing as a resource for weddings, and has amassed an impressive 240,000 followers. Many of the top 10 brands lend themselves well to the primarily female audience that Pinterest seems to attract, such as Real Simple magazine, Better Homes & Gardens and Whole Foods to name but a few.

Whilst there are plenty of home crafting and design ideas floating around, e-commerce has also been making leaps and bounds via Pinterest. Fashion retailers such as ASOS have been quick to get on side with Pinterest. The very fact that Pinterest's two main strengths are that it's primarily visual AND social lend it extremely well to products such as beauty and fashion.



Of course, on the other side of the coin, you may not want people to be able to share content from your site on their boards. Why? Because there’s no authentication process on pinning content, essentially the company allows its members to add copyrighted content without the original creator’s permission. Obviously, for many companies and individuals this could prove to be a serious issue.

As stated by Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest, “We care about respecting the rights of copyright holders. We understand and respect that sometimes site owners do not want any of their material pinned.”

To avoid such problems, Pinterest now provides site owners with a snippet of code, which can be found at the bottom of their Help page, which deters visitors from pinning their content.

Also in the works, Pinterest is currently testing a character limit for pin options in the hopes of preventing users from stealing content such as blog posts or articles, but this has not been rolled out to the public yet.

If you're interested in learning more about Pinterest, there's no shortage of information around, including our own Introduction to Pinterest on the Rocktime Blog.

There are quite a few lovely infographs available on the topic, which provide a great overview of how Pinterest has shot to fame and the kind of user base it attracts.

Whether it's technical, marketing or social, if you're after more information and want to talk to our sales team, then why not get in contact with us here at Rocktime.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Introduction to Pinterest

What’s the interest in Pinterest?

We’ve all heard of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but there’s a new young upstart making waves in the Social Media world. But what exactly IS Pinterest?

Based on the premise of a virtual pinboard, Pinterest allows users to build their own image boards, adding in all kinds of media from images to videos, or discussions, and comment on both theirs and other users’ pinboards. Registration is by either invitation from an existing user, or applying for an invite through the website.


It may sound like a bit of a fad, but there’s some impressive statistics to back it up.

Pinterest has actually been around for almost 2 years, but most of that’s been spent in an invitation only beta state. It wasn’t until December 2011 that the site catapulted itself into the top 10 social networks (according to Hitwise) and the tail end of 2011 also led to TechCrunch naming Pinterest the best new start up of 2011.
January 2012 has seen that success continue, and it’s now reported that Pinterest drives more referral traffic to sites then LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ combined! Last month comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique visitors, making it the fastest site in history to break the 10 million unique visitor mark. Not only does it boast some impressive numbers, but Pinterest has become a top traffic driver for Retailers.

Not only is it high in the visit numbers, but there are now over 10.4 million registered users. Furthermore, a surprisingly high percentage of them are women. AppData and Facebook’s advertising tools show that just shy of 98% of Pinterests Facebook fans are female. Women between the ages of 25 and 44 make up 59% of Pinterest users. Its a great way to share and build a community of enthusiasts. The pinboards and pinner profiles are found easily and high in the search results.

Pinterest doesn’t shy away from its appeal to women either, on the Pinterest About Us page they describe their pinboards as a method to plan weddings, decorate homes and organise their favourite recipes. Of course, there are a fair few blokes as well, Fiona, here at Rocktime, has an exclusively male following of 'pinners' (each with their own beautiful looking pinboards!) for her own Music pinboard.

Naturally, Pinterest has it's own YouTube Channel, full of useful How To tips and a Twitter feed.
The biggest brand on Pinterest is 'Perfect Palette', with 244,163 Followers, 113 Boards and 6,925 Pins. The success is due to this wedding blog helping visitors to explore and choose the colour theme for an upcoming wedding.


Popular content on Pinterest covers a whole range of areas, from cooking to crafts and skincare to pets. So far it seems to have great appeal through its simple interface and ease of use. These attributes make it a great method of sharing content, your Pinterest content not only shows up on your pinboard, but can integrate straight through to your Facebook feed too; Facebook-connected Pinterest.

When reviewing web analytics, it is likely brands will start to notice new trends in keywords, traffic sources, what is driving traffic and where content is getting shared the most. So, it is well worth factoring Pinterest into an Integrated Digital Strategy.

If you’re interested in finding out how to get your foot in the door and how Social Media can further your business online, why not drop a line to our sales team here at Rocktime.


Author: Alice Cheetham