Pinterest – a genuine challenger to the social media crown?

Towards the end of last week, I read about the ‘explosion’ in popularity of Pinterest.com, a new social networking websitewhich describes itself as “avirtual pinboard … allowing you to organise and share all the beautiful thingsyou find on the web”.

Ragan.com suggests Pinterest already has around 12million unique users in America and retains and engages users two tothree times more effectively than Twitter did at the same stage in itsdevelopment - pretty impressive when you consider the site only launched inMarch 2010.

So, bound by the terms of modern-day PR,requiring those working in the sector to keep one finger firmly on the pulse ofsocial technology, I decided to register an account for myself, and I have tosay, I genuinely think it has huge potential.
There are some obvious similarities betweenPinterest and Twitter, although the new player has clearly focused on a clean user-faceand has put its trust in visual content instead of a text-based approach. Someof the key functionalities are:

• Pinterest requires members to select any number of ‘pinboards’they like with the option to categorise as they please, for example, ‘Food andDrink’, ‘Sporting Equipment’ and ‘Interior Design Ideas’.


• Members can then ‘pin’ web content they find interesting on their ownpinboards and keep a collection of ideas in one place.


• Users can browse pinboards created by other people with similar interestswith the option to ‘repin’ found content on their own board.


• Users can also comment on any pins they find interesting

Pinterest allows users to use their Facebook or Twitterlogins to find friends on the site, so I took up the option to sync my accountwith my Facebook contacts. To my disappointment, I found only three ofmy 400 friends were registered with Pinterest, suggesting the concept hasn’tquite taken off in the UK yet. In fact, a report earlier this month from the DailyMail confirmed there were just 200,000 British Pinterest users, althoughthe site did increase its UK market share by 68 percent in January alone which is an encouraging statistic.

For me, Pinterest is currently a unique social networking websitewhich offers users the chance to create a visual expression of their individualpersonality. The site itself claims people typically use its pinboardsto plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and share their favourite recipes.

Marketing Week reported this month that Pinterest isn’tyet open to brands to build profiles, so we can’t build a de Winter profilejust yet. However, the site itself has admitted that while its short-termvision is on growth and making Pinterest morevaluable, “making money is a long term goal”. A Mashable.com report hasshown that it drives more traffic to third-party websites than Google+, LinkedInand YouTube combined, so it seems only a matter of time before the creatorsrelax these rules and let individual brands sign up.

As the old adage goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousandwords’, so it will be interesting to see if 2012 isthe year a new player emerges to challenge Facebook and Twitter in the socialmarkets. One thing’s for sure, the team here at de Winter will certainly be watching with ‘Pinterest’.

Social networking pays off with Facebook flotation!

Facebook this week has announced plans for a stock market flotation and is aiming to raise $5billion which, although in many people’s minds may sound enormous, is a lot less than many experts predicted.

But why is the world’s largest social media network so valuable? With over 700 million users worldwide this week’s announcement has meant that we have been able to learn more about Facebook, including discovering that last year it made an astounding profit of $1billion.

Facebook’s Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said himself that Facebook was not created as a business but more as a social tool to help people connect more, but with such a huge profit mainly generated from online advertising, this is one business model that is proving to be a success.

With the flotation Facebook is set to keep growing which will create even more opportunities for businesses to use this medium to directly contact prospective customers with targeted and tailored adverts.

As the BBC puts it "As …Facebook… is not a paying service, you are not the customer, you are the product," so social media advertising gives businesses the chance to directly target niche groups of people with tailored adverts (eg wedding venues in Cheshire targeting women who turn their status to engaged).

With businesses needing to find new and better ways to increase their customer base, Facebook is an invaluable tool. So maybe that multi-billion valuation doesn’t seem so outlandish now.

As a Cheshire PR agency we look after a number of social media campaigns for our clients, including one for fashion website go-style, so will be monitoring any changes Facebook makes over the next few months very closely.