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

Introduction to Social Media Sharing

The conversation on social media in our society is changing. Watch any TV show, listen to any Radio show and hear the presenters state their “Twitter and Facebook Page” names to encourage further interaction. There is also clear numerical evidence (for example: 600 million people on Facebook, June 2011) that people want to share online. Companies contact Rocktime to enquire about how they can effectively and positively connect with their site visitors via social media. Users of social media are also getting to grips with how they can effectively manage their ever growing networks and streams of notifications.

In setting a social share strategy, there is a clear need to consider the old Martini phrase “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere” and companies need to provide the ability to share their news on a variety of platforms, suited to the customer (“Tip: remember the people!!”). Also a big point to consider when setting your “social share” strategy is “will this news be of interest to my site visitors / customers?” as, if it isn’t, then over time (as your customers own personal networks of interaction grow) your news that you, for example “have a Sale on!” each day will be an unwelcomed distraction to them. Think about that some more and don’t be a bore! Furthermore in accordance with social media channels guidelines, saying the same thing again and again can also be classed as spam.

There is already a trend towards brands delivering their customers relevant and timely content, this is now moving more towards delivering more quality content. Make your content compelling so that people will want to share it.


Why Social Share is great

It takes little investment to add the social share tools to your site and from this development, your site visitors then have the opportunity to organically spread your news, your latest blog, your offer, your tip of the day etc, to their personal networks. News which can be shared again and again amongst networks of interaction, at no additional cost to you (apart from perhaps the time it takes to send a “thank for sharing tweet”, if relevant). Also social share now links with ranking positions in search engine result pages.


Make your site a social experience

As part of our quest to make our client's sites a more social experience, we would like to recommend that you consider adding social share icons to relevant sections of your website. Letting your site visitors know where else they can keep up to date with your news, updates, happenings and also giving them the ability to spread your news/content further.


Social Share Audit

We would recommend that you invite Rocktime to provide a social share audit of your website, where we will review social engagement icons and social sharing options that are used by your website visitors. For further details on our social share audit please call in and talk to sales or a member of the Flashlight Search Marketing team. Alternatively find out more about how Rocktime can help you with your Social Media Strategies here.


Author: Sarah Griffiths