Partner Views Blog

In my last blog I suggested that Pinterest may not be good for your inbound marketing strategy. My main point was not that Pinterest is not a good strategy for inbound marketing but that if your customers are not on Pinterest then it is not a good strategy. On the other hand if your customers are there then Pinterest is a great strategy. The mistake not to make is assuming you know how best to market on a social media platform based on your partial understanding of how it works, who you think would be interested in it, or if you think it is a good idea or not. Look at the statistics and the demographics then decide what would be best.

In my last blog on whether you should use Pinterest for your inbound marketing plan I mentioned that the platform was made for collectors and that it drives more referral traffic then YouTube, Google Plus and LinkedIn combined. Even with over 21 million users Pinterest may not be the best platform for you. Just because a social media platform has a lot of users and is very successful does not mean that you should use it for your inbound marketing strategy. A personal example would be StumbleUpon. According to shareaholic SutmbleUpon has the second highest traffic referral rates and fairly decent user base of 16 million worldwide users. Indeed, 14% of inbound traffic to my website from social media sites has come from StumbleUpon. Yet I have not received one lead from that traffic. I get less traffic from Twitter and Facebook but more leads. For some reason StumbleUpon and my site just don’t click. That’s fine, I do a lot better on LindedIn with my largest share of traffic and leads coming from organic search. Just because a site is popular does not mean it’s a good fit.

For one of the many who just recently found out about Pinterest I find the platform a lot of fun, every interesting and a bit addicting. If you are not familiar with Pinterest it is a lot like keeping a scrap book without bothering with the scissors and paste. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail and explain how it works or how to set up an account; the best place to do that would be Pinterest’s About page. One thing though, you just can’t set up a Pinterest account, you must be invited. If you would like to be invited send me an email at tim@imagemediapartners.com and I’ll invite you to join Pinterest.