In This Chapter

Finding your target influencer on Pinterest

Working with pin boards

Looking at successful Pinterest influencers

Pinterest launched in 2010, around the same time as Instagram, and in just five years it has fundamentally changed the way that people curate, save, and share visual content online. It introduced users to the concept of pin boards, which function as both a visual bookmarking tool and an inspirational outlet for sharing content.

To date, Pinterest users have created 50 billion pins across 1 billion pin boards. Data from comScore showed that from March 2014 to March 2015, Pinterest’s user base climbed 25 percent year-over-year to 72.8 million monthly active users. This visual platform is ideal for aspirational brand storytelling and showcasing your product or service through dynamic content, such as recipes, tutorials, infographics, and more.

In this chapter, we cover best practices for leveraging Pinterest for your brand, how to identify your target Pinterest influencers, and where to find them. Finally, we show you how to commission custom editorial content for your brand and leverage it across your brand-owned social channels to maximize the value.

Seeing What Pinterest Is About

The beauty of Pinterest lies in its simplicity. With just a few clicks, users can easily create pin boards; pin and share favorite products, images, and articles; and curate them for future reference. Pin boards are essentially vision boards full of beautiful, eye-catching content. Users can spend hours pinning aspirational items to their ever-growing collection, search for recipes they want to make for dinner and collect ideas for their kitchen remodel or DIY crafting project.

According to Ahalogy’s 2015 Pinterest Media Consumption Study, Pinterest inspires action. Almost two-thirds of active pinners (those who use Pinterest least once a month) and 84 percent of daily pinners (those who use Pinterest at least once a day) are inspired by Pinterest to try something new once a week or more often. In addition, 73 percent of active pinners and 89 percent of daily pinners have bought something new they discovered on Pinterest.

As reported in VentureBeat in March 2015, the top content categories on Pinterest are as follows:

• Recipes: Pinterest boasts more than 1.7 billion recipe pins.
• Shopping: Nearly 2 million people pin product-rich pins daily.
• Articles: More than 14 million articles are pinned daily.

Two-thirds of all pinned content is from a business’s website, so keep your website fresh!

The rapid ascent of Pinterest and its origin story is an interesting one. Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann has said that he built the platform to help people “discover things they didn’t know they wanted,” that seem “handpicked” for them and serve as a repository for aggregating vast collections of interesting content. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the company now bills itself as a “visual search engine for people to use in the course of things like wedding planning and decorating a new home.”

And unlike most of the social networking sites we’ve covered in this book, Pinterest’s earliest adopters were from outside the Silicon Valley bubble — moms, mostly residing in the Midwest, and between the age of 25 and 54.

Huffington Post tech reporter Biana Bosker largely attributes Pinterest’s popularity to the way it redirects people’s attention to who they aspire to be and the life they dream of living: “What sets Pinterest apart and makes it so appealing is its focus on who we want to be — not on what we’re doing, where we’ve gone, how important we are or how beloved. While much of the content shared on existing social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare screams, ‘Look at me,’ Pinterest posts urge, ‘Look at this.’”

Women are still the primary users of Pinterest (80 percent), but the ratio of male users is also shifting and growing. Mashable reported that men are its fastest-growing user demographic, with the number of men pinning and repinning doubling in 2014.

Evan Sharp, Pinterest’s cofounder and chief creative officer, claims that more men began logging onto Pinterest regularly around the time its recommendations began getting smarter. Pinterest serves more than 1.5 trillion recommendations annually. And in April 2015, Pinterest rolled out a “smart board picker” for iOS and Android mobile users that predicts which boards users will repin something to.

According to TechCrunch, over 80 percent of pins are actually repins rather than brand-new content, which speaks to the power of shareable, evergreen content and the way it continues to live on indefinitely. In addition, Pinterest referrals spend 70 percent more than visitors referred from nonsocial channels, including search, according to industry reports.

The best and most popular “pinfluencers” offer a variety of tightly curated thematic content. Users are also predominantly “makers” who are passionate about beautiful photography and sharing DIY tutorials, recipes, life hacks, and other useful content for improving your life.

Finding Pinfluencers to Share Your Brand Content

So how do you go about finding influential people on Pinterest? Well, first let’s start with a simple benchmark: The average Pinterest user has 229 followers and gets about 4.2 repins per pin. But when it comes to influencers, there are different levels:

• Low-average: 1,000 to 10,000 followers
• Intermediate: 10,000 to 50,000 followers
• High: More than 50,000 followers
• Celebrity status: 1 million+ followers

As it turns out, finding Pinterest influencers is quite similar to scouting for Instagrammers (see Chapter 7). Review your favorite blogs, including bloggers who have covered your brand in the past. Check to see if they have an active Pinterest account and review their pin boards. As you’re reviewing pin boards, take note of what general themes they cover, whether they pin mostly original content or repins, their photography skill level, and total number of followers.

You can outsource this research to an agency that specializes in networks of influencers across social platforms (see Chapter 5).

Commissioning Pinnable Content

It’s great to have influencers pinning original content that they’ve created for their blog posts, but what if your brand needs fresh content to pin on your Pinterest boards? How do you keep the content on your brand-owned channels interesting and evergreen without overextending your in-house team? Again, influencers to the rescue!

If you don’t have resources in-house to work with an on-staff photographer to create specialized product content for your marketing needs, consider contracting the job (or at least parts of it) to a professional influencer who can work on more budget-friendly terms. The right influencers will happily work with you to shoot a set of commissioned photos that can then be pinned on your brand’s Pinterest account or used in other marketing materials.

Chapter 4 has more information on how to contract influencers, but you can manage expectations on execution and increase your chances for success by following these four best practices for commissioning pinnable photography:

• Provide plenty of product. This is especially true if you can’t provide the highest level of cash compensation to the influencer. Err on the side of providing more product than you think the influencer will need. Having a variety of product to work with often fuels greater creativity for different styling options during the shoot.
• Set clear styling guidelines. You know better than anyone how your brand should be represented visually. Be clear about whether you want a label or packaging to be visible. Specify how many photos you need and whether they should be close-cropped or wide angle. Are there any restrictions regarding placement next to competitive products or brands? Be explicit about do’s and don’ts, and offer helpful tips for how to style your product in the best light.
• Allow creative license. Although you want to set clear guidelines, keep in mind that you’ve selected this influencer specifically for their photography skill and aesthetic, so let them shine by showcasing a unique perspective on your product. Allow a healthy amount of creative license. This will also serve to demonstrate to them that you respect their craft and it will result in the best, most authentic content.
• Give specific image file guidelines. Make sure to request high-resolution, original files without watermarks. Photos should also be shot to optimize for mobile, so go vertical. Pinterest organizes images vertically, stacked one on top of another in a grid, so pins with a vertical aspect ratio flow better on the platform. Also, most people use Pinterest on their mobile phones, and vertical pins look better than horizontal ones.
• Amplify your boards. When appropriate, ask influencers to share your boards with their audience as well in an amplification on Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Of course, this sponsored messaging should also be disclosed per Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines.

Pinterest search doesn’t support hashtags, so they don’t track what’s trending, and hashtags are only clickable in a pin description.

In the following sections, we offer more tips on working with influencers for commissioned content on Pinterest.

Leveraging Guest Influencers on Your Brand Pin Boards or Group Boards

Another creative way to leverage influencers is to contract them to “guest pin” to your brand boards or group boards. This allows you to curate influencer-selected content without violating Pinterest Terms of Service.

Influencer channel takeovers are mutually beneficial because they’re an opportunity to showcase your brand through the lens of a tastemaker, borrowing her aesthetic to curate content. And the influencer is promoted through your brand’s channel while adding an element of novelty. It’s an easy win-win for all parties! For example, Etsy leveraged a guest pinner’s vibrant picks in a custom pin board by lifestyle blogger A Subtle Revelry, hosted on the Etsy account (www.pinterest.com/etsy/guest-pinner-a-subtle-revelry).

To ensure that the influencer advocate you’ve selected is brand safe and a worthy evangelist for your brand, follow our suggestions in Chapter 6.

Group boards are a wonderfully collaborative way for brands to connect directly with consumers and influencers. By tying into an engaging common theme, brands can generate goodwill and authentic engagement.

In a recent #Pintermission campaign, Honda gave some avid pinners $500 to take a break from aspirational pinning to do an activity inspired by something they pinned before. Then these avid pinners were invited to document their adventure on a group board on Honda’s Pinterest account. See an example here: www.pinterest.com/caitlin_cawley/caitlin-s-pintermission. Caitlin’s #Pintermission board had 10 pins and reached 613,000 followers.

Group boards can also be leveraged effectively by brands with overlapping audiences or similar consumer demographics. One brilliant example is the Etsy/Random House group board: www.pinterest.com/etsy/guest-pinner-random-house. Inspired by a mutual love of literature, Etsy invited Random House to share their favorite literary finds as their Guest Pinner. Random House then shared its favorite literary-themed Etsy products on the group board, which has 29 pins and reaches more than 475,000 followers!

Measuring the Success of Your Pinterest Efforts

Your analytics dashboard on Pinterest will provide you with a wealth of information about the performance of your brand’s pins and pin boards, but currently there is no analytics platform that allows you to track the performance of pins outside of your own account. So, it can be a bit challenging to get a comprehensive read on how well your Pinterest influencer marketing efforts are doing.

For more helpful information on Pinterest analytics, watch the Pinterest video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt_aw6Q9Fb8.

Although it can be very manual, these are the concrete metrics you can measure from influencer marketing:

• Total number of Pinterest followers
• Total number of repins and likes
• Total number of comments

You may also use third-party tools such as Ahalogy (www.ahalogy.com) to measure the success of your Pinterest marketing/content campaigns and optimize the performance of your brand pins and boards. If you’re interested in Pinterest contests and sweepstakes, we recommend using the Piqora platform (www.piqora.com) for hosting — they offer robust campaign metrics.

Learning from the Most Creative and Inspirational Pinfluencers

In this section, we offer examples of influencers in the following categories: food, craft/DIY, lifestyle, and travel. We walk you through specific campaigns they participated in, tell you what they did, and explain why it worked.

These are just examples of influencers in various categories. These aren’t the only Pinterest influencers worth your time — not even close! Use these profiles as examples of what to look for when you’re searching for influencers for your own campaign.