As a marketer, you are probably familiar with Pinterest as a great web site for ecommerce. The 70 million denizens of Pinterest land share recipes, travel destinations, and great products they want to buy for themselves and their families. Pinterest, we know, is great for driving both traffic to ecommerce web sites, and conversions. As Pinterest grows and evolves, the ways its users utilize the platform continue to change as well.
According to some recent reports, it appears Pinterest and social sharing might just go together like peanut butter and jelly. In its third quarter report on social marketing, Gigya has broken down the demographics of social sharing online. A social share occurs when a user makes use of a web page’s built in “share” button.
The use of these share buttons has been dominated by powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter. However, in Q3, Pinterest’s share of all social shares rose from 18% to 20%. In addition to items traditionally shared on Pinterest, like ecommerce items, more and more users are using Pinterest to share media, magazine and newspaper articles, and educational items.
It is important for marketers to remember that Pinterest is still a relatively young social platform, and that two years from now, we may be talking about it as something totally different than what it is now. Look at Facebook and Twitter as examples to see how much a social site can change in just a few years. In its infancy, Facebook was primarily a tool that was used by college students to keep in touch with one another. Now, with 1.2 billion users, it is the dominant social platform across most age brackets. Twitter was initially a site populated by people working in the tech industry. Now, it is a source of news for many, and some of its most rapidly growing user groups are teens, and adults over 45. Maybe Pinterest will become the internet’s primary hub for sharing articles and videos. Maybe it will become a micro-blogging site. Maybe it will still be a social platform that is seen as predominantly beneficial for ecommerce conversion. We can already see, based on Gigya’s report, that Pinterest today is already very different than what it was just a few short months ago.
What are your thoughts? Have you seen users sharing your site’s media and articles across Pinterest? Do you think Pinterest will continue to evolve as a means for sharing media? Share your thoughts with us!
