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Pinterest Suddenly Got Really Pinteresting (sorry!)

You may have heard that Pinterest, the virtual pinboard site, raised US$200 million in a new round of funding (if you didn’t know that, watch the video for a two-minute backgrounder). Total valuation of the site now stands at US$2.5 Billion, up a billion dollars from a year ago.

Not bad for a site that hasn’t yet earned any revenue.

Now that we’re talking some serious dosh, expect a bit more effort from Pinterest in terms of “turning views into money”. The site itself is carefully architected to link from pictures to places where you can purchase the subjects of those pictures; that’s a natural starting point for efforts to extract money from marketers.

eConsultancy last week chimed in with its perspective on why Pinterest is important for marketers:

• 25% of Fortune Global 100 companies have Pinterest accounts.
• Pinterest pins with prices get 36% more likes than those without.
• 43% of Pinterest members agree that they use Pinterest to “associate with retailers or brands with which I identify”, compared to just 24% of Facebook users who agree to the same use with Facebook.
• According to a study by Convertro, Pinterest represented 17.4% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites in April 2012, up from just 1.2% in Q2 2011. The data was taken from 40 of its clients, most of which are top 500 internet retailers.
• According to a Bizrate report 69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase as compared to only 40% of online consumers who visit Facebook.
• The survey, which interviewed 7,431 online buyers from August 9 to 17 2012, also found that significantly more online consumers agree that Pinterest is a place to “get inspiration on what to buy” and “help keep track of or collect things I like.”

• Last year Sony published data which showed that Pinterest drives 2.5 times more traffic to its homepage than Twitter. Similarly, there are 10 times more clicks of the ‘Pin-it’ button than the ‘Tweet This’ one.
• Jewellery retailer Boticca found that after integrating ‘pinning’ buttons across its website, Pinterest became its number one social referrer, assisting roughly 10% of sales, compared to 7% from Facebook.
• Furthermore, Boticca found that Pinterest users spend more than twice as much as Facebook users ($180 vs. $85), and the site drives higher numbers of new customers. 86% of visits from Pinterest are new to Boticca compared to 57% from Facebook.

All of which makes Pinterest a pretty tempting dish to put before a marketer.

BTW, if you’d like to know more about how to use Pinterest to market your business, check out Lesson Two of our Advanced Social Media Marketing course.