BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Nailed It: Buzzfeed Cracks The Pinterest Code

This article is more than 9 years old.

Buzzfeed is one of of the fastest growing media companies ever, with a monthly audience of 150 million and counting, thanks chiefly to its unmatched understanding of what people will read or share on Facebook. But much of its recent traffic growth has come from another, less appreciated source: Pinterest.

Just two years after it started explicitly producing content intended for sharing on Pinterest, the $5 billion visual social network is already Buzzfeed's second biggest source of social referrals, beating out runner-up Twitter.*

Dao Nguyen, Buzzfeed's vice president of growth and data, says most publishers probably aren't paying enough attention to Pinterest as a potential traffic source. "Pinterest is huge. It's giant," Nguyen says. "It's regular. I wouldn't say it's predictable, because very few networks are, but it's untapped."

To improve its feel for how Pinterest users interact with content, Buzzfeed has an internal "Pin Ops" group whose members meets regularly and compare notes. In March, they presented some of their insights to other publishers at a conference Pinterest held for its media partners.

(Photo credit: mkhmarketing)

Among those insights:

-The stuff you think will be most popular on Pinterest -- crafts, home decor, food, complicated nail art -- generally is, but it's not the only content that thrives there. "We found that a lot of our humor posts do extremely well," says Nguyen. In fact, of the 100 Buzzfeed stories that have the most traffic from Pinterest, 30% of the visits are to humor posts. "It's a powerful platform for all kinds of content, not just quote standard Pinterest content," says Nguyen.

-Pins and clicks don't always correspond. In keeping with Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile's maxim that there's "effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading," certain types of posts, often featuring beautiful photos of food or vacation destination, are often pinned without the pinner clicking through, at least not immediately.* On the other hand, humor pins get more clickthroughs than repins.

-Pinterest has its own distinct rhythm, but that rhythm is speeding up. Compared with Facebook and especially Twitter, Pinterest is a tortoise. More than half of Buzzfeed's Pinterest referral traffic goes to posts more than two months old. But that's changing, says Nguyen. Whereas the rule of thumb used to be that Pinterest-targeted posts took several weeks to go viral, now they usually show a spike in the first week, though the traffic continues to mount over a much longer period than is usual with Facebook or Twitter.

Buzzfeed readership is just one of several measures on which Pinterest has overtaken Twitter recently. Pinterest also now appears to have more female users in the U.S. than Twitter, and it might even have more users overall.

Of course, Pinterest and Twitter are very different animals, so there's no reason to treat the competition as a zero sum one -- except in some ways it is. A new Harvard Business School case study on Buzzfeed includes the interesting tidbit that the site stopped showing "Tweet" buttons to readers who come from Pinterest's desktop site because they weren't ever getting clicked on. Instead, it started using the space to enlarge the size of the Pinterest button -- and saw the rate of shares double.

*Clarifications: I've made a two changes to the original version of this post after hearing from Nguyen. First, I should have made clear that Pinterest is Buzzfeed's second-biggest source of social referrals, not referrals overall, which would include search. I also changed the last paragraph to reflect a difference in what users arriving from Pinterest see depending on whether they came from the desktop site or mobile app. Users who come from mobile see a Pin button that appears when they hover over or tap an image; implementing that led to a 10x increase in shares.

Finally, I want to note that Buzzfeed doesn't agree with the Tony Haile quote I referenced, which Nguyen says doesn't apply in this case: "On Pinterest the image is often the content, which is different from Twitter, Facebook or a publisher's site." Good point.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my websiteSend me a secure tip