6 Tips for Using Pinterest to Promote Your Retail Business
If you're not aware of Pinterest, it's quite possible that you've been living under a virtual rock. In just four years, the image-sharing site has grown to become one of the biggest movers and shakers in the social media world. In 2012, comScore data revealed that Pinterest was the fastest stand-alone site to pass the 10 million unique monthly visitors mark in the U.S.
Pinterest's current monthly visitor total of more than 70 million worldwide might be small potatoes compared to Facebook's audience of over a billion, but Pinterest's unique visual slant has been proving valuable for retailers.
Online jewelry and accessories retailer Bottica, for example, recently conducted a study of its social media traffic and the results were surprising. It found that Pinterest had become its No. 1 social referrer, helping to generate nearly 10 percent of its sales, compared to 7 percent from Facebook. What's more, visitors to Bottica's website arriving from Pinterest spent over twice as much as those arriving from Facebook ($180 vs. $85). Eighty-six percent of visits driven by Pinterest were new visitors, compared to 57 percent driven by Facebook.
Bottica's experience certainly isn't unique. AddShoppers is a service that offers social media analytics and tools that enable retailers to add features such as social logins and social sharing buttons. It reported that Pinterest accounted for almost a quarter (24.3 percent) of all social network-driven transactions for its 10,000-plus retail clients in 2013. That was slightly more than Facebook (24.2 percent) and Twitter (20.9 percent), and way ahead of Google+ (6.6 percent). Email accounted for 19.2 percent and assorted other platforms made up the final 5 percent or so of revenue.
Despite this, many retailers have been slow to join Pinterest, while almost all have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Jon West, CEO of AddShoppers, suggested that more retailers should be working out how to best use this visual discovery tool.
