While the social channels may seem different, marketers can successfully apply the same strategies to each by using different specific tactics. For example, successful use of Pinterest requires great content, but on Pinterest it’s best to “avoid self-promotion” (see Pinterest’s terms and conditions). Take a look at this article I found on Socialmediatoday.com about the 3 things you must know about Pinterest.

Pinterest made a speedy and impactful entrance to the world of social media. At first a haven for mommy bloggers and home decors fanatics the site quickly became a huge traffic driverfor websites where pins originated from. As sales numbers reflected the referral traffic increase, people started to notice that not only is Pinterest a fantastic way to make your stomach growl in 2 minutes flat but also a site that benefits business in a big way.

To break down the website in sections, let’s take a look at Pinterest’s bread and butter, the pins. Without the pins, there would be no boards, no likes, and certainly no repins. What makes pins so important is the original content being added to the site daily. Like with anything on the web, new, original content is what keeps people coming back and in this case, what allows users to repin the original content and grow their boards. During season changes, the site explodes with new styles, new dinner recipes, and the newest must have items. Once the original pin happens, repins aren’t too far behind them.

Repins are an exact copy of the original pin and don’t require a bookmark download to add the image to a board. Repins add the perfect amount of gamification to a site that otherwise mimics an old school corkboard. Those that post original content, rely on repins to grow their following and influence on the site. Since over 80% of Pinterest is made up of repins, brands should be using this information as a way to estimate sales, inventory, and current and future trends. Where the original pinner might be your biggest brand ambassador, the repinners are your potential customers and help to expand your reach on Pinterest. But how can a company leverage this information and make it useful to their brand? This question is understandable, pins, especially repins, can be overwhelming and tricky compute as they tend to overwhelm Pinterest’s basic search option.

As it stands now, Pinterest struggles to quantify pins, provide pin history, and offer more details to its popular pinboard design. For brands trying to gain a greater understanding of their mentions on Pinterest, this can be difficult. Until now, there has been no way easy way to surface mentions about a brand, product, or keyword on Pinterest. Without a way to find this information it can be difficult to know the impact your brand, product, or keywords are having. Viralheat recognized the lack of analytics associated with Pinterest mentions and has now added this capability to their social media monitoring and analytics tool.
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Our new Pinterest Analytics feature will focus on keywords entered into Viralheat profiles. These keywords can focus on product, brands, descriptive words or a combination of all three. Once entered, Viralheat will identify all mentions associate with the profile keywords. Pins will be pulled based on image title, link, description, title or board. The mentions are then sorted by most recent time. Analytics for the mentions is also pulled, clearly defined metrics such as total pin mentions, influencers, and original pins are put into an easily understood dashboard.

As with most things in life, if you can measure it, you can manage it and if you are able to do both of those thing, it’s really high time to understand it. Having the ability to surface mentions and gather data relating to Pinterest pins, boards, and repins will finally enable brands to take actionable measures to get the most out of Pinterest.