More than ever, marketers are faced with the daunting challenge of matching the pace of evolving social media channels against the need for timely, relevant, and strategic analytics. Only through these analytics is it possible to fully understand how consumers not only interact with each other, but also interact directly with brands and competitors.
And while we’ve all heard – and have been preaching – for years regarding the importance of listening to conversations and measuring growth and engagement on established platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube, the elusive question of effective and efficient measurement of not-so-new anymore Pinterest remains.
With this in mind, here are some recommendations on Pinterest stats that may be particularly compelling for brands to examine, understand, and act upon. After all, what value are we really creating if we can’t tie our work to any meaningful consumer points of contact?
1. Growth: Followers – % Increase in Followers vs. Total Followers
- As with other social media channels, it’s important to understand how quickly a brand’s presence is growing, as well as its level of total followers.
2. Volume: Total Pins and New Pins in any time period
- Tracking content quantity over time can help brands determine an appropriate posting cadence.
3. Engagement: Total Repins and Repin per Pin Ratio and/or Total Comments and Comments per Pin Ratio/Total Likes and Likes per Pin Ratio
- One measure of engagement on Pinterest, Total Repins, casts light on a brand’s individual board performance over time relative to its other boards. Examining the Repin per Pin ratio helps determine how sharable a brand’s content is during any given time period. Together, these stats can help identify topics that are most compelling to followers
- Comments and Likes metrics are essentially similar to how post effectiveness can be judged on Facebook.
4. Context and Benchmarks: These above metrics shouldn’t exist in a single-brand vacuum.
- True analytics relevance is created by establishing benchmarks against a similar competitive set.
- For example, if a brand is growing its Pinterest presence by 100% from one time period to the next, that is a great finding, but it certainly has different meaning if that brand has just launched on Pinterest, vs. one that is established and leads its competitive set in overall followers.
Additionally, examining the competitive set can also yield the potentially interesting finding of determining where a brand’s Pins are coming from. Understanding how different types of content from different sources may impact any of the above metrics can potentially help inform how a brand strategizes its own future content
All of these metrics are conceptually simple and logical interests for any brand that invests time and resources in its Pinterest presence. The greater challenge comes in being able to gather these metrics quickly and accurately, and tie them to important brand KPIs without undue heavy manual analysis. Given that Pinterest does not currently offer its users a platform such as Facebook Insights or Google Analytics, marketers and the managers of Pinterest boards must look to third-party sources. Among these are Pinerly, Pinfluencer, and Pinreach, but a more comprehensive solution – WOMMA member Unmetric – affords in-depth findings into brand and competitive Pinterest pages, as well as those on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and is definitely our go-to source.
With the right Pinterest metrics in place to help guide strategy and content, there are fewer obstacles to truly fostering engagement and building brand recommendation on what’s emerged as one of the hottest social platforms.
This blog was originally published on the Zócalo Group blog.
