Vested Pinterest

Janet Thaeler and Paul Wilson created PinnableBusiness.com, a website dedicated to sharing information about how companies can utilize the social media site, based on industry research and data they started collecting very soon after Pinterest launched. The savvy pinners explain in this Q&A how small businesses and garden centers can communicate with customers and promote their brand on the website.

Garden Center: Why did you think early on that Pinterest would be a good social media site for businesses to join?

Paul Wilson: Early on we had decided we wanted to genuinely understand how Pinterest could work for businesses. Unlike other relatively new social networks at the time, such as Quora or Google+, Pinterest and its alluring visual elements seemed easier to engage and accept. We quickly realized that Pinterest was going to be another great social tool for businesses. So, we started researching everything we could on the network. From our intense research a mountain of business data on Pinterest surfaced. We created our website in order to make sense of this research, and to further help businesses turn this information into actionable items.

Janet Thaeler: At first my reaction was like many, not another social network! Our attention span has gone from short to shorter and pictures are faster to grasp than reading. Images also evoke emotion, which is part of marketing. Pinterest is so full of content that just takes minutes to browse. It’s easier than Facebook, and they made it quick to save and share what you find. I read reports about how fast the site was growing. To me, this signaled opportunity.

GC: Do you think every retailer should be on Pinterest? Why? Or does it make more sense for certain industries?

Wilson: The Pinterest target demographic is right for many retailers, and like Facebook, as Pinterest reaches critical mass it will be right for all retailers -- but only if retailers are determined to actively engage the network. Just creating a profile and not providing useful content adds clutter to Pinterest and the web as a whole. The retailers who actively build relationships via Pinterest now may or may not see immediate benefits. However, what they will see is the long term effect Pinterest has on consumers, particularly as more and more consumers emotionally resonate with the network. We’ve seen this emotional connection much more with Pinterest than with other social networks.

GC: How can garden centers take advantage of Pinterest during the holidays? Are there any best practices or things they should consider?

Thaeler and Wilson: When it comes to holidays, providing timeless pins are a must. One thing we have learned is that Pinterest favors pins older than a year. So, really working on holiday material should be planned for next year. Having holiday theme boards and pins will become more and more popular as years pass.

Here are 3 Pinterest ideas a garden centers can consider:

1) Doing a holiday contest around Do it Yourself (DIY) home decor and crafts. Having people repin their favorite DIY pins and select one that the garden center will do in real life. This allows for additional content you can use and it also helps the garden center to know what people like. Keep in mind that Pinterest has tightened their rules around Pin it to Win it contests, so be sure to read up on their rules and guidelines (http://business.pinterest.com/brand-guidelines/).

2) Create a Pinterest Board that is a Holiday Advent Calendar. Each day provide a new pin that is themed around the holidays. Have those pins, and also pins on your website, be what people can do at a garden center.

3) Finally, provide pins that share tips on how people can give garden-friendly gifts during the holidays. For example, stating the different types of flowers that are best to give during the New Year vs. Easter.
The most important thing is to be creative, fun, and have timeless contest. Your holiday campaign may not gain much traction this year, but the beauty of Pinterest is that pins can easily be found and shared regardless of how long ago they were pinned.
 

Editor's Note: The text above will be published in the November/December 2013 issue of Garden Center magazine. The rest of the questions edited for space are included below.

GC: Can you talk about how the benefits differ for local businesses vs. national chains?

Wilson: National chains benefit significantly more from Pinterest than smaller, more local, retailers. The main reason is that big chains can leverage their other vast networks to promote their Pinterest presence. Case in point, when we interviewed Walmart about their Pinterest contest, one thing that really helped them was how they could advertise the contest on their Facebook page that had over 20 million followers. Obviously, most small businesses do not have this strong of a network. Pinterest is still just beginning when it comes to localizing their network. Even though a user can identify their location on their profile, there really is no way to target people by location. This shouldn't discourage small businesses from getting on Pinterest. By actively being a part of the Pinterest community, businesses can increase awareness and ultimately get significant amount of traffic to their website. Yes, they don't have the same advantages as the big box companies, but if their message is unique and interesting it will be found and shared.

GC: I know there are probably many, but what are the major benefits of Pinterest for businesses? How can Pinterest make them profitable?

Wilson: First, the secret to profitability for most sites on the web is to continually drive targeted traffic, which converts to the requested objectives of the website. Simple formula, difficult execution.  Pinterest can assist in this formula by driving targeted users who have visually connected to the image they were just viewing. When businesses create visually pleasing pins on Pinterest, it helps the user to make an emotional connection to what they are viewing. This helps in the process of people emotionally connecting to a brand before they are given the hard sales pitch. In essence Pinterest is a soft sale with a punch, which explains why websites are reporting much higher conversions from Pinterest users than any other social network.

Engagement is the true power of social media. Being able to be a part of the conversation with potential buyers or your consumers is crucial. Yet, a business engages differently on Pinterest than on Facebook or Twitter. Currently, Pinterest’s messaging system is only found through its pin comments, which should be utilized. However, there is even a more powerful way to engage on Pinterest that is often overlooked -- Pinterest’s source directory. The source directory is where a business goes to see what people have pinned from their website. For example, if you go to http://pinterest.com/source/pinnablebusiness.com you will see what people have pinned from our website. Imagine if Twitter or Facebook allowed businesses to see a page that showed every link, image, or video that was shared from their website. Pinterest’s source directory is exactly that. It tells you who liked your brand enough to bring content over from your website to Pinterest. We built a free marketing tool called PinAlerts.com that sends email alerts any time this action happens. Once someone has pinned something from your site onto Pinterest you can leave a comment and begin the engagement process. We’ve found with PinAlerts that brands can be more active in building a following by quickly engaging with those who pin their site’s material. Engagement truly can help build a loyal following, and Pinterest provides a unique and powerful way of doing this.

One major benefit of Pinterest is how easy it is to have pins go viral. If you consider the pinning and repinning function of Pinterest, which is the primary way of sharing content, you will quickly see how Pinterest is built to make things go viral. When someone pins something and I come along and repin it onto my boards this pin is injected into the pin stream of all my followers. When they repin this same pin it is broadcast out to their followers, etc. Furthermore, unlike most social networks, where viral sensations are short lived, Pinterest pins can be viral for months. This is mainly due to Pinterest boards, which preserve the pins for future followers with similar interests. For a business this means having content go viral and driving traffic became much easier. It also means businesses can spend more time providing quality content, and not worry so much on building a content mill that has to continually push out content in order to avoid looking stale to their consumers.

GC: What are some best practices businesses should use on Pinterest such as  ideal number of boards, photos, repinning?

Wilson: Personally, we have learned that best practices equate to guidelines not rules. We’ve seen a Pinterest profile that had only one board be popular, and another profile with 10,000+ pins have under a 100 followers. The best thing to do is to find a popular Pinterest profile you like, and see how you can apply their techniques and tactics to your own brand. With that said, there are some hard fast rules when participating with Pinterest that are important to know. Such as, what image dimensions are considered too small for Pinterest, or what advertising limitations Pinterest has. For these rules we encourage checking out the infographic we made on Pinterest Image Optimization, or what we call PIO (visit: http://plw.me/Xt1L8P).

GC: What are the shortcomings or pitfalls of Pinterest that businesses should look out for?

Wilson: A common perception that companies shouldn’t use Pinterest as a product catalogue. This may be true for some companies, but we have found that other companies like Rocky Mountain Mattress (http://pinterest.com/rockymtmattress/) and The Good Mama (http://pinterest.com/wyckhurst/) use Pinterest solely as a product catalogue and have seen great success. So, again it comes back to guidelines. Decide what your objectives are for using Pinterest and build your company’s social footprint accordingly.