Brands that have not yet looked at Pinterest to amplify their social ROI could be missing out on a big piece of the revenue pie. If you are a marketer, there’s a lot to like and explore on Pinterest. Going by modern standards of Pinterest Marketing, it’s quite a heady cocktail of social, search, and shopping (purchase or buy).

From a very humble beginning in 2011, Pinterest today is valued at over $11 billion and has over 175 million MAU. Pinterest is not the usual run on the mill social networking platform. In fact, it can be a splendid channel for marketers to get more out of their social spends.

• More than 100 billion pins have been posted on Pinterest
• There’re more than 1 billion active Pinterest boards
• Over 2 million users save shopping pins on boards daily
• 60% of Pinterest users are from the US
• 81% of Pinterest users are females
• Over 5% of referral traffic to websites takes place through Pinterest (Omnicore)

Let’s see why Pinterest can be a social ROI home run!

Powerful Engagement and Influence on Purchase Decisions

Apart from sharing photos (through pins) among friends and family, the second prominent reason that people use Pinterest for is – shopping! No doubt that it’s a social ecommerce platform in more ways than one. The network shot to fame when the Time Magazine named it among the best 50 websites. The rest is history!

• In the US, Pinterest is second only to Facebook when it comes to influencing purchase decisions of social media users (eMarketer)
• 93% of active pinners plan purchases on Pinterest and 87% have purchased through Pinterest (Kantar Millward Brown)

Pinterest helps brands interact with audiences through visuals which is always more impactful. You can send quality traffic to your site and leverage that for powerful, relevant engagement. Therefore, the scope of brand exposure on Pinterest is vast and immense.

AI on Pinterest

In 2016, Pinterest created a stir when it allowed users to shop for things by taking their pictures. Target embedded this feature in its app too. It was followed by a revolutionary introduction – Pinterest Lens. This introduction brings AI to Pinterest through computer vision and deep learning to incorporate search advertising on the social platform. Lens leverages computer vision to enable users in identifying, creating or buying things they see in the physical dimensions or online. When someone takes a picture of an item they desire, the Pinterest app uses Lens to automatically find ‘Related Pins’ with links to buy that product online. This contextual personalization has begun to pay off with ‘Related Pins’ garnering 5% higher engagement.

Support for Video Ads

Yet another compelling feature on Pinterest is video advertising. It allows brands to add a whole new element to their Pinterest presence by adding a ‘promoted video’.  With that, there has been a 60% rise in the number of videos on Pinterest. Clearly, people seek visual content to augment their shopping or browsing experience. The combination of promoted pins and video ads can drive your sales opportunities. Pairing a customer review with a tutorial video is a great combination.

Promoted videos can be shared directly from YouTube by just hitting the ‘share’ button for a specific video and then clicking the Pinterest icon. The UX is better as users don’t get redirected from Pinterest and can view a YouTube video on Pinterest itself. This is a great opportunity for video marketers to move away from the noise of YouTube and be more precise in terms of targeting an audience. Slideshare content is also popular on Pinterest but that gets redirected to LinkedIn. It is outreach nonetheless, and can never be bad for a marketer. Moreover, a mere drag-and-drop helps you to link Instagram and Twitter posts as pins too.

Massive Scope to Expand Male Audience

Despite what one of the stats mentioned at the beginning indicates, contrary to the belief, Pinterest is not a female dominated platform by any means. Yes, the number of female pinners is higher with wedding, fashion, beauty, home décor, recipes, and DIYs, being the top categories. However, as a brand marketer, here’s something intriguing for you:

• 39% of female pinners opt for Pinterest search over other engines like Google and guess what, when it comes to male pinners, the number stands at 48%
• 40% of Pinterest MAU are males
• 97% of searches are non-branded  (Hootsuite)

So, what do the above numbers tell you? Don’t bring in gender-divide or mind-cluttering thoughts for marketing or advertising on Pinterest. An ABM professional, irrespective of gender, can be a Super Bowl fan and at the same time love Peruvian cuisine. At Pinterest, you can stitch them all together to offer coherent personalization. What’s more? Pinterest has a microsite dedicated to the Super Bowl.

Meet the Pinteresting Ones

Here’re some brands that you can draw inspiration from to propel your social ROI on Pinterest.

Amazon – There’s no doubt about who they are. From ecommerce to cloud, they’ve been acing it all. The Amazon Pinterest profile has 65K followers and a whopping 68 boards. From their own products like Echo to deals, style, fashion, and food, there’s a board for everything.

HubSpot – 40.7K followers and 59 boards! HubSpot is sailing smoothly on Pinterest. The boards are varied in nature and include digital marketing, HubSpot success stories, marketing cartoons, and much more. The Hubspot Pinterest page confirms the vast scope of the platform.

Twitter – A social platform’s page on another social platform! Weird? Not at all. Twitter on Pinterest has 21.6K followers and 20 boards. All the boards revolve around Twitter and range from hashtags, videos, or its organizational culture and memorable moments. Great take on building brand image and creating brand awareness.

Intel –With 13K followers spread across 21 boards, Intel on Pinterest is all about tech in our lives. They have a dedicated board – ‘Women’s Fashion Tech’ which means the company has the attention of the large audience of female pinners. Intel also includes pins of products form fashion tech companies. The company says that with its Pinterest strategy, monthly engaged viewers have increased by 48% and average monthly viewers are up by a staggering 364%.

IBM – The Pinterest page of IBM is a testimony to its commitment towards spreading awareness among the audience. Over 4.4K followers with 12 boards, you would not believe that they have a dedicated food board on cognitive cooking. It’s called Chef Watson’s Cookbook which is an analogy to its AI platform.

GE – 28K followers and counting with 39 boards, GE’s presence on Pinterest is strong and active. Science DIYs to environment and health to fabulous kitchens, the global conglomerate showcases it all.

Some more with the right Pinterest mix:

Etsy | Birchbox | Whole Foods | L’Oreal | Lonely Planet | Tesco

Never Run Amok and Keep It Meaningful

Pinterest is a highly-immersive social platform. The key is to be strategic in your approach and it can work wonders for your social ROI. Being in a state of helter-skelter and blindly following others won’t work out. Try and stitch together a series of engagements through your pins and boards instead of engaging in isolation. Stick to these four pillars:

• Maintain a few humor-based boards
• Repurpose content without overdoing it
• Stay inspired and keep inspiring with quotes-based boards or pins
• Maintain the human touch

Like any other social platform, your content on Pinterest reflects you. When it’s developed with your audience in mind, it automatically becomes valuable and resonates for long. So, keep educating, keep entertaining, but remember to keep it meaningful and interesting, or rather, ‘pinteresting’.