This poll analysis was written by Jeremy Victor, president of Make Good Media and editor-in-chief of B2Bbloggers.com. For more of his writing, visit B2Bbloggers.com and follow him on Twitter and Google+.
SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week we asked: Is your business using Pinterest?
- No, and we’re not considering it: 40.38%
- Yes: 30.77%
- No, but we’re considering it: 28.85%
As the social networks have matured and settled into their roles (Facebook=Connecting with friends; Twitter=Discovering what’s happening; myYearbook=Meeting new people; Google+=Late to the party), a new category of social applications entered the scene over the past year or two. These services, coming to be known as social curation services, aim to provide unique ways of making the vast amount of information being shared on the Web easy to find, bookmark and read.
Unless you have been living under the proverbial social media rock, no doubt you have heard about the latest darling of this category: Pinterest.
According to Hitwise, Pinterest “recently emerged as one of the top 10 websites within the Hitwise Social Networking & Forums category” with nearly 11 million total visits in a week (back at the end of December). For an invitation-only site that is nearing just its second year in existence, that is astonishing. Consider this additional study from Shareaholic that reported “Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.”
The data is pretty clear; Pinterest is rapidly growing in popularity and it’s great for referral traffic. For the 40% of you not considering it, I might suggest that you rethink that decision. As it seems with numbers like that, the hottest social media question of the day is, “How can you best take advantage of Pinterest for your business?”
Share your ideas in the comments. Let’s help each other learn.