When people think about Pinterest, wedding dresses, recipes and gardening tools likely come to mind. However, the bookmarking site is deepening its relationships with publishers in a push to better feature articles and how-to stories.
For several publishers with "evergreen" stories that are just as relevant today as they are six month from now, being on Pinterest is paying big dividends. Pinterest drives more traffic to About.com, for example, than any other social network. About.com told FORBES that users who come to their site from Pinterest are 200% more engaged -- by time spent on the site and by stories read -- than users who come from other social networks. The Huffington Post’s lifestyle section, with stories on topics like self-care tips for moms, or how to get motivated to workout, has a Pinterest-first social strategy, said Christina Anderson, editorial director of HuffPost Lifestyle, in an interview.
“We hear from our partners that we’re in the top three referral platforms, and number one in a lot of specific areas,” said Eric Hadley, head of partner marketing at Pinterest. “The traffic of things that people want to do in the future, it’s pretty evergreen. If I want to go on vacation to a beach, that beach, that town, all the information when I travel, that’s going to live forever.”
Users pin more than 14 million articles on Pinterest every day, and all pins, including article pins, get repinned about 11 times on average, the site said. Pinterest’s guided search tool, which suggests specific search options for pinners, and the ability to save articles to boards to read later, for example, on a commute home, help make consuming articles more seamless on a platform not necessarily known as a reading destination.
The potential to boost article readership on Pinterest is apparent in the site’s user growth. Pinterest doesn't release numbers, but eMarketer estimates that the site's U.S. monthly active user base will reach about 47 million this year, up 11.4% from last year. By 2019, eMarketer expects nearly a third of all U.S. social network users to be monthy Pinterest users.
Pinterest is making a “big effort” to expand media partnerships, Hadley said.
“We doubled down and got into media partner teams recently,” said Hadley. “They are seeing the value of this return, so they are putting more content on Pinterest.”
It isn’t uncommon for Pinterest to meet publishers at their office to walk them through how to create more detailed pins, known as rich pins, which offer longer descriptions and links to other web pages.
“They have been very willing to come to our offices and lead us in best practices,” Anderson said, noting that Pinterest has offered her team “dos and don’ts” on pin-making. “That has been extremely helpful.”
Pinterest offers publishers free analytics, showing them, for example, how many times pins are repinned and insights into who is engaging with the pins. Analytics also help partners know which headlines, descriptions and images are jiving with readers, as well as which topics are performing well, Hadley said.
A Niche For Evergreen Stories
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Publishers say Pinterest is often a good place for articles people want to read just for themselves, but not necessarily share with friends. For example, how to lose weight, or manage a mortgage are topics you can read about on Pinterest but likely wouldn’t share on Facebook or Twitter. Stories like this can be just as or more popular on Pinterest a year after they first published.
“We all in the publishing world lived in a Facebook-, Twitter-focused world for the past three years,” Anderson said. “We’ve really made an effort to reach out to Pinterest and say, ‘Let’s partner.’ We know that our audience is on Pinterest.”
About.com and Huff Post approach Pinterest as a search engine for retrieving information more than as a traditional social network focused on connecting friends, the companies said.
“We help you, we teach you how to do a barbecue or work with diabetes,” said Neil Vogel, About.com’s CEO. “Twitter [traffic] lasts an hour. That doesn't really work. Facebook for a day or two sits better. What matches our content best is Pinterest. It allows you to build a library.”
Two years ago, About.com articles didn’t have a share button and social networks generated about two-tenths of one percent of traffic, Vogel said. Since About.com’s relaunch last fall, which involved upgrading more than 75,000 photos from top articles on the site, About.com has seen about a 30% increase in page views, largely thanks to Pinterest, Vogel said. The site is hoping for double-digit traffic from social this year.
“A lot of the things that worked for everybody else didn’t work for us,” Vogel said. "Pinterest has much more of an intent piece to their traffic. It’s a search engine for people’s desires and inspiration.”
Create A Polymer
The usual suspects like home, travel, beauty and food tend to be popular article topics on Pinterest. But sometimes science-related or more unusual topics like how to build a pub shed are top performers.
About.com’s most-pinned article is about how to build a bouncing polymer ball, said Vogel. Other popular stories are often related to family crafts, education, hair removal, pregnancy and specific how-to stories such as how to fix a zipper or make ice cream from snow, he said. About.com receives more traffic from Pinterest on weekends and holidays than on weekdays, emphasizing how readers often look to Pinterest to complete an activity, Vogel said.
One of Huff Posts’ most popular stories on Pinterest is about how to create wedding lighting, and has been for months, said Anderson. Slow cooker and mason jar recipes are also in-demand. Huff Post checks which topics are trending on Pinterest to help guide what stories to produce. For example, if articles on Pinterest about making baby nurseries with neutral colors are popular, Huff Post will take note and aim to to create that content, Anderson said.
Perks For Pinterest
Pinterest said the growth of article pins on the site isn’t just benefiting publishing partners.
Helping publishers boosts the quality of content on Pinterest and even brings more men to Pinterest, the site said. Pinterest’s users are currently about 80% female, according to eMarketer.
“We’re seeing a huge growth in men,” Hadley said. “Rich article pins from media partners are really driving it.”
Pinterest is so important to Huff Post’s social media strategy that the publisher is planning its site redesign, coming out this summer, with Pinterest in mind, said Anderson.
“This is really a win-win ecosystem that brings great content into Pinterest,” Hadley said. “On the flipside we can send great users and referrals back to them.”
