Over the last 12 months or so Pinterest has graduated from the school of ’emerging social networks’ to become part of the canon of ‘established social platforms’. As such it’s no longer a platform purely for early adopter brands but a serious consideration for most major retailers.
Despite this evolution from niche to mainstream Pinterest is still in its infancy. Experian Hitwise data shows that UK Internet visits to Pinterest tripled between March 2012 and March 2013 with the website receiving in excess of 16 million visits a month. With the growth of Pinterest showing little signs of abating, this is a network worth investing in. But which retail brands are currently making the most of the growing marketing potential of Pinterest?
Clickstream
In terms of visits made immediately after Pinterest, eBay, Etsy and Amazon emerge as the top recipients receiving traffic from the social network.
You can see from the top 10 recipients of Pinterest traffic the skew towards fashion websites such as ASOS, Topshop and Next whose brands have a natural fit with the appeal of Pinterest.
Brand recognition and retention
Clearly social media isn’t all about generating direct traffic, there is the softer side of creating communities, raising brand awareness, listening to customers and so on. This is much harder to quantify in analytics but one thing we can do is monitor brand searches up to five searches after a visit to Pinterest. This is by no means perfect but is a useful benchmark of brand recognition and retention – how likely is a user going to be influenced to search for a brand as a result of something they saw on Pinterest?
What this table shows is the top 10 retail websites that showed a much higher propensity to be searched for after a visit to Pinterest compared to normal search. An index score of 100 benchmarks the average (i.e. no discernible change between normal search and a search after a visit to Pinterest) whereas anything over 100 denotes a greater likelihood to search for the brand.
Etsy in particular emerged with a huge Index score of 846 which means UK Internet users are eight times as likely to search for the Etsy brand after a visit to Pinterest than they would if they were just visiting Google normally. Fashion brands Urban Outfitters who have historically had very strong social presence also Index very highly with users nearly three times as likely to search for the Urban Outfitters brand after a visit to Pinterest.
As I mentioned earlier it’s perhaps not that surprising that apparel brands like Monsoon, ASOS, Topshop and others do so well out of Pinterest as their brands naturally align with what Pinterest is all about. Special mention should go to IKEA, for innovating in this space. People were 32% more likely to search for IKEA after a visit to Pinterest than they would in a normal search.
So there you have it – the top brands currently getting the most out of Pinterest. As the platform continues to grow it will be interesting to see whether fashion brands continue to dominate the list or whether other verticals including department stores, electronics, music, toys and grocery will enter the fray.
Until next month.
