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The Power of Pinterest

“Expressing passion for a hobby is just as easy as browsing for your next purchase. But what is even more addictive about the site – a collection of collections – is that it’s just as much about the users as it is about what they’ve posted” – Mashable

As the newest Social Network on the Social Media scene, I, along with my colleagues have invested a lot of time into Pinterest to see if it is worth the hype. I can safely say, it definitely is.

So what is Pinterest? Pinterest is a content curation platform which allows users to organise and share beautiful and interesting content they find on the web.

Pinterest is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and Twitter which is a great achievement considering it has only been around for two years. Pinterest has proved its worth by driving more referral traffic than Youtube, LinkedIn, Myspace and Google+ put together.

The Pinterest mobile app has been downloaded over 250,000 times and the newest social network is projected to account for 40% of social media driven purchases (60% Facebook). The current average purchase for Pinterest, is $80.00.

Not only is Pinterest growing at an astounding pace, it is becoming the new “it” network for the sheer appearance and exclusivity as it is an invite only platform (unless you want to apply for an account which can take up to two weeks). Pinterest is retaining and engaging users 2-3 times as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in history.

The powerful thing about Pinterest is that it not only gives you the freedom to share your images with your audience, but you can also sell inside of Pinterest with a tool called Pin2Sell. You also have the ability to search for certain products within their sector. As a business, being on Pinterest will work in your favor if you share engaging pictures. You will not receive any “likes” or “repins” for images that aren’t “Pinteresting”.

For a company that has only been on the scene for just over two years, it has been valued at just under $1.5 Billion. This valuation holds its own power. It proves that we respond to visually stimulating images or videos as a way to engage with a business.

There are some great infographics, presentations and blogs out there, giving you a breakdown of some great Pinterest Statistics and tips to utilising Pinterest.

Protecting your Brand on Social Media

The Olympics is now coming to a close and social media has played a huge role in a partaking athlete’s brand protection. A great video I found that was shared by Mashable shows spectators giving their views on Social Media and Olympic Athletes, with one quite rightly saying “Everything is hitting Twitter before it hits the news”.

With Usain Bolt’s twitter following increasing by over 300,000 from the beginning of the Olympics to this date, he has not only protected himself and his brand, but he has also gained a lot of support. Why? Because people like him.

For your business to have a successful Social Media presence, people need to like what you do. This isn’t to say you won’t receive negative comments however; you need to deal with this in the right way. British Diver Tom Daley is a prime example of this. After receiving malicious tweets from one of his followers, he reported this to the police who then arrested the culprit.

Another example is glass repair company Auto Glass. I noticed on one of my colleagues twitter timeline that there were a lot of negative comments towards this company. After reading through the conversation between Auto Glass and my colleague, I then realised where they had gone wrong. Rather than actually apologising from the beginning, they spent around four tweets trying to justify their unacceptable service. In the end however, Auto Glass called my colleague and offered a full refund on the repair for the inconvenience. Once something is out in Social Media, it cannot be taken back. Regardless of the end result, this case will have damaged the reputation of Auto Glass as it was not dealt with in a swift manner.

It has been suggested that only 31% of Social Media complaints actually receive a response. In my eyes, this is not good enough. As soon as you see a negative comment about yourself or your brand you need to address it straight away. If you are struggling to monitor the chatter around your business in Social Media, you should use Social Mention Alerts.

To make sure that I protect my Business Gloople and my brand Warren Knight I use various tools. Along with Social Mention, I also use Google Alerts and specifically for Twitter; Twilert.

Protecting your brand is crucial, especially on Social Media where freedom of speech can damage a business’s reputation.

I would love to hear about your good, or bad experiences with companies that operate on Social Media.

Twitter finally helps you understand more

If you have even seen me speak, you will understand my passion around Hootsuite and how much easier it makes connecting with your target audience across multiple social networks.

Now Hootsuite are making you pay $5.99, just for the pleasure of having a few accounts and enjoying the analytics to enhance your communication. Whilst I feel this is still great value Twitter have Finally given the users some insight to help our online communication. Thank you Mashable

Twitter has started inviting a select group of users to test a new analytics product, Mashable has learned. Such a product has been rumored for some time, and a Twitter executive said earlier this year that Analytics would debut by the end of 2010.

With Twitter Analytics, users will be able to see a plethora of data about their account; for example, information about which tweets are most successful, which tweets caused people to unfollow, and who the most influential users are that reply and retweet their messages.

In the images below, you can see how some of this data is charted. A bar graph over 6-hour increments shows you mentions, follows and unfollows, for example, and you can filter tweets by categories that are defined as “best,” “good,” and “all.”

In what will no doubt come as a blow to the third-party vendors that are already providing similar tools, we’re hearing that the product will be free and that Twitter (Twitter) has no immediate plans to charge.

We’re working to gather more information, but we may hear more about it later this afternoon, when Twitter’s Evan Williams takes the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Stay tuned.

Screenshots

[thanks @mongoosemetrics for the images]

Twitter isn’t bad… it’s just different

Today is no different to any other day, and as a true follower of Mitch Joel I have decided to share his in-site into Twitter as he opens the door to some very interesting points. Enjoy!

Don’t get too caught up in the amount of followers that someone has on Twitter or how big the overall network actually is.

Unlike some of the other new media channels, it’s important to remember that Twitter is still nascent, confusing, busy and hasn’t fully matured to the point where it has a clear direction or intention. The more people connect on Twitter, the noisier it gets. The noisier it gets, the harder it is to uncover the gems, find the most relevant conversations, and the best people to follow.

The Real-Time Web only complicates Twitter further.

Even if you have a significant amount of followers and those people are able to amplify your message, Twitter lives in the real-time Web. Meaning: if you’re tweeting while your key followers aren’t on Twitter/paying attention, your content remains stagnant in the ever-flowing river of tweets that flow in an unrelenting tsunami of 140 characters. This is why many of the more “influential” people on Twitter actually retweet their own content several times a day, across multiple time zones. They are – in essence – trying to ensure that their tweets rise above the noise.

We all can’t be Ashton Kutcher (apparently, this is a good thing).

Ashton Kutcher has close to six million followers on Twitter (I know, that’s incredible. And no, it’s not a typo), but Mashable had a recent Blog post titled, Ashton Kutcher Has Little Twitter Influence. According to the Blog post: “A study conducted at Northwestern University determined that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with millions of Twitter followers are mostly ignored on the social media site, resulting in very little if any influence. When the researchers applied their mathematical algorithm to the countless tweets that appear on Twitter each day, they found that experts in certain fields were much more likely to cause topics of discussion to become trends. That might come as a relief to social media enthusiasts who crave discussions of substance, and a surprise to critics who argue that social media is prone to inanity.” Once again, we’re looking at the whole “quality over quantity” debate.

Is there really a lot of conversation happening on Twitter?

Social Media monitoring company, Sysomos, released a study yesterday titled, Replies and Retweets on Twitter. There is no denying that a retweet is a powerful indication that what someone says on Twitter has relevance (more on that here: The Retweet Is One Of The Best Measurements Of A Brand’s Success), but the stats from this research (which studied 1.2 billion tweets in the last two months) may surprise you…

  • 29% of all tweets produced a reaction (a reply or a retweet).
  • Of that group of tweets, 19.3% were retweets and the rest replies.
  • Out of the 1.2 billion tweets only 6% were retweets.
  • 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published.
  • 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour.
  • 0.94% of retweets happen in the third hour.
  • 96.9% of @ replies happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published.
  • 0.88% of replies happen in the second hour.

Beyond the retweets and replies is there a conversation?

Here’s what the Sysomos research says: “We also examined the distance between an original tweet and the replies it attracts. Of all tweets that generated a reply, 85% have only one reply. Another 10.7% attracted a reply to the original reply – the conversation was two levels deep. Only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are three levels deep – after the original tweet, there is a reply, reply to the reply, and reply to the reply of reply.”

Twitter isn’t bad… it’s just different.

Yes, there are millions and millions of people on Twitter, but don’t confuse Twitter for a traditional mass media outlet. It’s not. It’s a live organism that can be one thing in this moment and something completely different in the next. You could have all of your followers active and engaged in one moment and silence in the next (depending on if they’re online or not). Twitter continues to be many different things to many different people. And, because of the many uses, people, applications, broadcasting and communications, we’re not seeing a ton of depth or amplification (as we may have once thought). That doesn’t make Twitter bad, useless or on its way to irrelevancy, it just makes Twitter something different that we’re all going to have watch and figure out.

Is Twitter nothing but noise? What’s your take?