Partner Article

The brief: can I pique your P-interest?

Pinterest is now a “top driver of traffic to the websites of women’s lifestyle, home décor and cooking magazines, including Martha Stewart, Elle and House Beautiful “ according to a recent Forbes.com article.

The lifestyle site, famously dominated by hobbyists and focused on the domestic, is magnetising venture capitalists and puzzling online marketeers everywhere, as we struggle to place it in our eclectic social media diet.

All that glitters…

Part of the issue is maturity. According to Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten who led the recent investment round that fired Pinterest into centre stage, Pinterest is still an “early stage company”. It’s still , and nervous about monetisation schemes that could easily alienate its core audience.

Pinterest feel their “coffee morning” vibe is key to maintaining their audience, but Mikitani believes that he can provide monetising opportunities He believes the curation can revolutionise discovery shopping, turning consumers into marketers by linking their pinboard items to relevant suppliers. It’s a subtler twist on Amazon Associates, or in Mikitani’s words: .

Pinterest trends

Meanwhile, online ventures with clearer business strategies are moving in on Pinterest territory, by turning visual. Facebook is trialling a “Pinterest-like app“ where images are displayed on a , with “like” and “comment” buttons below each one.

Companies such as Scriberia and freelance graphic artists such as Mick Rhodes, who specialise in visual thinking and visual storytelling, are being hired by firms like Google to create Pinterest-friendly graphic records of key speeches and debates.

Apart from image-sharing site like Flickr, blog sites like Tumblr are prioritising visual records of events and experiences over the accompanying explanatory text.

Should your business be on Pinterest?

See my article to get a full kill or cure nutritional analysis of what Pinterest can do for you…

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ann Winter .