How marketers use Pinterest and Instagram to win customers
Social media plus strong imagery makes a compelling combination
Photo-sharing sites such as Pinterest and Instagram are at the forefront of a new wave of social networks which showcase beautiful images uploaded by artists, brands and the public. Marketers are using the sites to drive social shopping and inspire people to collect and share pictures of their favourite products.
Fashion chain Topshop collaborated with pinboard site Pinterest in November to encourage shoppers to pin their favourite products - that's the equivalent of clicking Like on Facebook - from the retailer's website on to their own Pinterest pages, which are known as boards. This helped shoppers create personalised Pinterest Christmas gift guides. The most pinned products were featured on the Topshop homepage and shoppers could enter their Christmas-themed Pinterest boards into a competition to win prizes at the store.
The chain also installed giant touchscreens in flagship stores in London and the US so shoppers could see the most popular pins. Popular items on display had swing tags attached stating that they were most pinned products.
Topshop's global marketing and communications director Sheena Sauvaire says the campaign aimed to get people to collect gift ideas and share them with family and friends in an attempt to create a social shopping platform. This is a much-touted development in retail where people will increasingly use social media to help them choose what to buy.
For us it is part of a strategy to see how we can connect what is going on in the digital world and social communities with our store environment. We've worked with other platforms but thought Pinterest was perfect because of the interaction it encourages with products, she says.
She believes Pinterest's appeal to a young, female audience is a good fit with Topshop's customers.
It is so visual and that is the beauty of it. We also have a lot of engagement on Instagram, it has been a really popular channel for us. The visual channels are where we are seeing the greatest interest, she says.
Pinterest has over 53 million monthly unique users globally, with three quarters of usage coming through its mobile app. The network has started limited tests of paid-for promoted pins in the US, but all other brand activity is free. The company is establishing an operation in the UK where it had some 2.6m unique users in October 2013, about 1.5 million females and over a million males, according to Comscore MMX.
UK country manager for Pinterest Sarah Bush says the great attraction of the network is that it helps people plan what they want to achieve - from organising a holiday to cooking a meal. The three most pinned topics on the network are for pictures related to travel, party planning and fashion.
She says that while Facebook is mainly for posting about what has just happened and Twitter is great for talking about the here and now, the attraction of Pinterest is its use for future plans. Because of how people use Pinterest, it is a tool which helps facilitate future planning - to plan what you are going to cook tomorrow night for instance.
So when you're in the supermarket, you have the mobile app and you've created a pin board of meals with recipe pins and you can browse the aisle looking for ingredients. She says Pinterest is also powerful for discovering new products and prospective experiences. It is like Google, a search engine. It's an environment where you discover and do things, because all pins have a destination. And it can work for a wide range of businesses.
Brands can get involved by going to the Business Centre on the Pinterest website, where they sign up for a verified account, ensuring it links through to their official website. They can also add a Pin It button to their site. They can make use of different types of rich pins containing extra information. For instance, the newly-launched place pins include a map, address and phone number while article pins include headline, author and story description, helping pinners find and save stories that matter to them. There are also product pins, recipe pins and movie pins.
Meanwhile, Instagram says it has 160 million monthly active users globally, with 65 million photos uploaded every day and with a billion likes per day. The Facebook-owned company says users spend three times as long on Instagram as they do on Pinterest and twice as long as on Twitter.
UK brands that have used Instagram include Burberry, which has posted live pictures of its fashion shows including London Fashion Week. The fashion retailer has grown its Instagram following organically to over one million. Red Bull has documented a cliff-diving competition in Wales through Instagram. And Jaguar has published a series of short films as part of an Instagram video campaign to promote its F-Type Coupe launch.
Publishers are also active on the photo-sharing sites, with Random House getting 1.5 million Pinterest followers. Christine McNamara, director of partnerships at Random House in the US, says that many authors use Instagram to post teasers about upcoming books, and give a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a writer. And she adds: Success on Pinterest is about authenticity and consistency - keep your following engaged with relevant content on a regular basis and you will find success. And it can't hurt to find beautiful images to communicate with such a visually compelled audience.
Brands may find that pictures speak louder than words when it comes to scoring a hit with social shoppers.
