Pinterest Marketing Trends Shaping 2012
Pinterest went from invite-only curiosity to a real ecommerce referral channel this year. What changed, and what brands did about it.
Pinterest opened this year as the fastest standalone site ever to reach 10 million monthly unique visitors in the US, according to comScore’s early-2012 numbers, a growth curve that outpaced Facebook and Twitter’s own early trajectories. That milestone changed how marketers talked about it, from “interesting niche site” to “channel we need a plan for.” A few things drove that shift.
Retail referral traffic became too big to ignore
Several online retailers reported Pinterest sending them more referral traffic than Twitter by mid-year, a surprising result for a site that, unlike Twitter, had no verified business accounts, no advertising and no official API for most of the year. People were pinning product photos organically, following boards from brands they liked and clicking through to buy, all without any paid push from the retailers benefiting from it.
Pinterest for Business finally arrived
Pinterest launched dedicated business accounts and business-specific terms of service in November, along with widgets that let brands add “Pin It” and “Follow” buttons to their own sites and an early analytics dashboard. Before this, businesses using Pinterest were technically operating personal accounts and improvising, so the November rollout was the company formally acknowledging what marketers had already been doing all year.
Rich Pins started showing real product data
Late in the year Pinterest introduced Rich Pins, pin formats that could display live information pulled from the linked page, current price and availability for product pins, ingredients for recipe pins and so on. For ecommerce brands this mattered because a pin stopped being a static image and started functioning more like a live product listing, with price drops visible directly in a user’s feed.
Visual, shoppable categories dominated
Fashion, home decor, food and DIY content pulled a disproportionate share of engagement, which lined up with who was on the platform: overwhelmingly women, many of them already in a browsing or planning mindset rather than a social-catching-up mindset like Facebook or Twitter. Nordstrom took the connection further by tagging its most-pinned items with in-store signage, a direct feedback loop from online interest to physical merchandising.
Pin It buttons spread across the open web
By year’s end, “Pin It” buttons were showing up next to Facebook and Twitter share buttons on product pages across a huge range of ecommerce sites, a quiet but telling sign that site owners had decided Pinterest referral traffic was now reliable enough to build for permanently, not just a curiosity worth monitoring.
What this meant heading into 2013
Businesses that spent 2012 treating Pinterest as a place to post product photography and organize them into useful boards, gift guides, style inspiration, project ideas, ended the year with a functioning referral channel built entirely on organic reach. That window wouldn’t stay wide open forever, but for now the return on a modest time investment was hard to match anywhere else.
More on Marketing Strategy, or browse everything from 2012.
