The Marketer’s Guide To Pinterest [Infographic]

Pinterest, the visual social network that lets users “pin” images they like from around the web to virtual pin boards, is stacking up to be one of the fastest growing social sites of all time.  With more and more people joining Pinterest every day, it’s becoming impossible for marketers to ignore the Pinterest phenomenon.  But how can marketers get in on this?  A new infographic from MDG Advertising takes a deeper look.

‘Pin It to Win It: A Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest’ breaks down the “who, why, and how of Pinterest.”  The infographic starts out by taking a look at the people who pin.  The breakdown is currently 87 percent female to 13 percent male, with most pinners being between the ages of 25 and 54.
So, as a marketer, why should you be on Pinterest?  The infographic explains, plainly, that you should be on the site because it’s making history.  “According to comScore, Pinterest hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in January, making it the fastest standalone site in history to cross the 10 million mark.”  They also provide convincing statistics on how Pinterest is driving traffic, and list some big brands that are already on Pinterest.
Once you’re convinced, the infographic sheds some light on how you can make Pinterest work for your brand with some helpful tips, including adding ‘Pin It’ buttons to your site content, pumping up the quality of pinable content on your site, and more.
Check out the infographic and let us know what you think in the comments below.  Is your company on Pinterest yet?  If not, do you plan to be?

Pinterest – An In Depth Look at the Stats

There’s no big surprise to social media fans that Pinterest is blowing up.  It’s recently become a site that has traffic in the top 100 sites on the web, and rumors have it valued around $200m.  That’s a lot for a company that doesn’t have much revenue.  But just how engaged are the users that use the service?  The folks over at RJMetrics put together a rigorous report to find out.
RJMetrics simply did some scraping to analyze a series of users by looking at their “Pin” boards over time, and see how they’d engaged.  They found some pretty incredible statistics, including the following.

• Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history.
• Pins link to a tremendously large universe of sites.  Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it only represents about 3% of pins.
• Over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the tremendous virality at work in the Pinterest community.  To contrast, a study done at a similar time in Twitter’s history showed that only about 1.4% of tweets were retweets.
• The quality of the average new user (as defined by their level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high but declining.  Users who have joined in recent months are 2-3x less active during their first month than the users that came before them.

There’s a lot more in the report, including a breakdown of the various sources of pins and the breakdown of how many people actually use the pinmarklet versus just repin other’s content.  There’s also a detailed cohort analysis which looks at various groups of users that joined the site and their behavior over the first twelve months of use of the site.  They find that the earlier users are the power users, but that most cohorts have stayed engaged on the site.
Head over and take a look at the report and let us know what you think.
Image: pedrosek via Shutterstock