How often do you look at the interaction on your social media accounts and wish you could transfer it to your website? Even better, what if you could make money from it?
Pinterest, I believe, provides that opportunity. Although the user base is small (it was closing in on 11 million users in February) its growth has been rapid, and lately, more diverse, with about 80 percent of its users women. That’s down from more than 95 percent in late 2011.
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How to take advantage of that middle-class, mostly twenty- and thirty-something demographic? Promise a reward for pins, even if you’re the one pinning them (more on that below). The post I read that sparked this idea came from Steve Buttry, who laid out many great ways in which journalists can use the multimedia-sharing site. Here is the quote that stood out to me from the York Daily Record’s Social Media Coordinator Buffy Andrews discussing a “Recipes” board:
“Readers will upload their recipe photos to our online gallery. We will pin their photos, along with a link to the recipe online, on a Pinterest board. Each month, they will be given a new vegetable and fruit. Each month, we will select a winner from a random drawing for a gift certificate. We hope to find a grocery store to sponsor.”
With Pinterest still “new”, and media sites eager to find additional revenue streams, this seems like a great opportunity to provide a low-barrier advertisement opportunity that also engages users.
The Daily Record’s contest is monthly, and gives $25 gift cards to the winners. The company asks users to submit the photos and recipes via email, and while that may yield fewer entries than if it just opened a board for anyone to pin to, it allows the company to control where the photo originates. This means the staff can post it on their site and pin it to their “Recipes” board, which would have a click-through URL back to the site, therefore increasing traffic, which should be the aim of most journalistic boards in the first place.
It’s a bit of a trade-off from the open board idea, but it also allows for easier confirmation of original recipe entries, not to mention that you can only upload your own photos via the mobile Pinterest app, but not through the desktop version of the site. (If there’s a way to upload photos to Pinterest from your computer, please share.) Otherwise, all desktop pins must have originated from a website, giving the email-it-to-us method an advantage if the goal is to drive traffic back to the site.
The Daily Record’s “Recipes” board for its Smart Magazine only has 261 followers at the time of this post, not enough to make an advertiser drool, but when you consider the cross-publishing aspect between the board and the Smart Magazine website, it makes for a more attractive platform. Then when you think about how many other themes you could come up with – user photo of the week/month, a holiday-based board with seasonal contests, sports-related contests, I could go on – there’s a pretty big, if not completely untapped, opportunity for an additional revenue stream where a social media site plays a significant role. The only thing left to do at that point is find someone willing to sponsor the contests for the right price, which certainly beats pinning for free.
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