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We all noticed the wave of articles at the start of the year positioning Pinterest as one of the fastest growing social networking sites ever, rivalling the likes of twitter and Facebook. Pinterest has now reached 18.7 million users and the secret to its success, people love their visuals, powerful images, videos and infographics deliver a message in seconds.
How does it work?
It’s in the name, plain and simple, pin your interests. Pinterest is being described as a virtual corkboard, users can create their own boards based on their likes and hobbies and pin images and videos with their followers and publicly. The benefit of using Pinterest over other social networking sites is it is more time friendly, the user does not have to write anything witty or informative in order to share a pin.
The majority of users (70%) are women, using it to share recipes, craft tricks and to plan their wedding. I like to use the site recreationally to discover new fashion brands and trends and keep in the know.
Pinterest is a great marketing tool, marketers can use it for research, to find out their audiences interests and create effective campaigns. Recruiters can use it to pin job adverts and promote company values and food brands and restaurants can pin mouth watering recipes.
Honda has just launched ‘#Pintermission’ offering the five most active pinners $500 in exchange for going out and enjoying real life for 24 hours and then pinning about it at the end of the day to promote their new Honda CR-V car as ideal for getting out and about in.
Honda aimed to inspire other Pinterest users to take a day off from Pinterest and so far the response to the campaign has been positive and very interactive with the initially invited five pinners posting images of trips to Hawaii, Portland and London, one of the invitees, Jon, has had a total of over 850 repins of his #Pintermission posts.
The twitter hashtag has had over 200 tweets and the Honda Pinterest invites have had 43 likes and 45 repins and the campaign is still growing.
Since the integration of Vimeo and Pinterest on 11 April, the second integration of video on the site, marketers are recognising this as a key move to adapt to the ever growing use of video. Pinterest is a well-rounded and influential marketing tool for brands to truly engage with audiences and deliver a USP in seconds.
Want us to create and launch a ground breaking campaign for your brand on Pinterest?
Contact us
Natalie.owen@ptarmiganbp.co.uk /0113 237 2825
According to Mashable, Google + now has over 62 million users, and is growing by 625,000 users per day, a significant achievement for the social platform which launched last summer.
Google has been subject to much scrutiny surrounding its ‘share’ feature hosted on the Google homepage, allowing users to instantly update their status.
Its circles feature is far more advanced than other social networks by allowing users to separate personal and work accounts, to categorise into anything from friends, colleagues, family, and so on.
Google + hangouts is an extension of Facebook’s chat application, Google + allows users to take advantage of video conferencing, desktop sharing, including sharing YouTube clips with up to nine people at a time – not as advanced as webex which allows 20 users at a time, but still a clear leader in the social media rankings.
Large brands have already tested out the application; Coca Cola launched a hangout last week hosting Olympics memorabilia, President Obama also jumped on the bandwagon by hosting the first ever digital interview in the White House last month, with over 227,000 questions submitted to the US President: http://bit.ly/wstBGB
The application opens doors for brands who want to engage with consumers face-to-face, and take a more human approach, fashion brands embrace it by allowing fashion bloggers to give style advice, tech companies give out IT support more personally.
We even had a little play with the application last week and recognise the huge potential of such a powerful marketing application, not just for our agency but for our clients. We cannot wait to host a webinar, workshop or networking event on the platform.
natalie.owen@ptarmiganbp.co.uk
Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger Google + Page: http://bit.ly/AzMU4d
Last week McDonalds launched a twitter campaign to generate positive sentiment around the brand. McDonalds launched a campaign on 18 January via twitter using the sponsored hashtag #McDstories, to promote the quality of their ingredients using the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers. The hashtag was quickly hijacked with negative attacks against the brand from some unhappy consumers and animal rights protesters that seized the opportunity to air their negative stories.
McDonalds removed the hashtag in the hour and issued a statement to Paid Content admitting defeat. They said, “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course.”
The change of course they took was removing the paid-for hashtag and waiting for the media hype to disappear, which has been criticised heavily as poor reputation management and a huge PR fail.
Twitter accounts for a quarter of online conversation and is a powerful marketing instrument to amplify your businesses ethos; it is vital businesses engage with consumers by defining a positively led hashtag and monitor any negative outcomes in real time.
With twitter now having a branded page feature, if companies wish to give their customers a microphone and engage socially, they must identify a core crisis plan identifying a key list of potential issues that may occur and provide solutions before launching.
Want to talk about how we can help your business by managing your brand online?
Natalie.owen@ptarmiganbp.co.uk
0113 237 2821
