Make The Most Of The New Pinterest Analytics

The image-based social media website Pinterest is an undisputed darling among online “cool hunters,” design geeks, DIY nuts and shoppers. Though it only opened its virtual doors just three years ago (and only as a closed beta back then), Pinterest has already become the third-largest social network operating today, trailing behind only Facebook and Twitter.

And it’s not just Pinners who love Pinterest. Both B2C and B2B businesses —including 69 of the world’s top 100 brands—are seeing returns from their Pinterest fans. In fact, Pinterest-based shoppers spend an average of $169 per online purchasing session (a number no other social network comes close to matching).

Now, with the recent introduction of an analytics interface, the company is laying some significant groundwork for increased business engagement—and ultimately, the monetization strategy Pinterest will need to live up to its $2.5 billion valuation.

The analytics interface enables website owners to “take a look under the hood” and gauge how their visitors are engaging with the platform and how potential customers are being directed to their brands.

Core metrics include:

• Number of pins created from images on your website
• Number of users who have viewed pins related to your website
• Number of visitors being directed successfully to your site via Pinterest
• Popularity measures for your pins: which have been viewed the most, which have been repinned the most, etc.

If you are a business owner with a Pinterest presence, or you’re seeing traffic from Pinterest to your website, here are a few tips to make the most of this new tool:

Study Shows Growth In Corporate Use Of Social Media Platforms Across Latin America

Perhaps the  corporate leaders in North America who continue to struggle with how to integrate social media into their marketing and service strategies should be looking at what our neighbors south of the border have been up to.  According to a recent report, social media use by Latin American companies is growing by leaps and bounds –and with increasing sophistication.

During its latest “Latin America Social Media Check Up,” Burson-Marsteller looked at the online activities of the top 225 companies in that part of the globe.  Comparing currently gleaned data against the Latin America social media “check up” performed in 2010, the numbers compiled in the newest report are quite impressive. For example:

How Do Consumers Use And Value Online And Social Media During Purchases?

For anyone who’s still struggling with whether and how to incorporate social media into marketing campaigns, here’s a somewhat obvious, yet brilliant, way to determine how consumers use online channels on their path to purchase —just ask them!

That’s what Radius Global Market Research did, and the results contain some compelling lessons for marketers developing online media strategies.

The survey questions centered on what kinds of products consumers researched prior to making a decision to buy and which platforms they used.  As in earlier studies, respondents indicated that online research played a major role in helping them make informed decisions.  This was particularly true for big ticket items, or products for which people have strong emotional investments.

Here are a few salient findings that caught my eye:

What The Harlem Shake Teaches Us About Authenticity

Remember playing “telephone” when you were a kid –you know, the game that starts when one person whispers a message (the more complicated the better) to another, and then that person whispers the message to the next person, and so on through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group?

As I’m sure you recall, the telephone game usually ends with something hilarious because errors almost always accumulate in the retellings, and when the message is finally announced by the last player, it’s typically quite different than it was at the start.

Apparently, the Harlem Shake, a dance which is the genesis of the internet’s newest meme, has suffered its own version of the “telephone” treatment.

According to Mashable, the dances spreading like wildfire online bear little resemblance to the real Harlem Shake, which originated in uptown Manhattan in the early ‘80s.

All of which brings up important questions for today’s digital marketers: How can brands maintain authenticity when ads or ideas go viral? What can you do to ensure your campaign doesn’t take on a life of its own as it gets shared, re-shared and then shared, again online?

Here are a few fundamental tips to keep in mind:

Most Companies Still Not Measuring Social Media ROI

I find the continued unwillingness of some business executives to embrace social media to be, in the words of young Alice in Wonderland, “curiouser and curiouser.” Could it be a reluctance to go down what they perceive to be a “rabbit hole?”

Although a new study conducted seems to indicate that more and more corporate leaders do believe in the importance of social media platforms  from a business perspective, with more than half stating they expect to increase their social media budget in the future, the percentages take a nosedive once survey questions focused on strategy and implementation.  That’s surprising, especially considering rising customer expectations of corporate social media responsiveness and other research demonstrating how businesses can use social media platforms to improve their bottom lines.

With more than 400 responses from management personnel at the director or above level, each of whom stated they were social media decision-makers or influencers in their companies, the findings from this study were indeed a mixed bag.  On the plus side: