How to: Pinterest and measuring influence

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Digital influence is one of the hottest trends in social right now, with online services trying to determine the potential to influence behaviour in social networks. Klout, Peerindex, Kred and TweetLevel among many others attempt to rank your ability to influence your followers and friends alike. Brian Solis of The Altimeter Group breaks down influence into three components – Reach, Resonance and Relevance.

So what happens when the hottest trend in social meets the new must-have social site? Hailed by some as the new LinkedIn, Pinterest has experienced meteoric growth, surpassing 13 million users (in case you haven’t succumbed, Pinterest is a virtual pinboard to which users pin images, videos, or snippets of text from other websites or even content that they’ve written).

So how do brands fit into the Pinterest world? Some brands have flocked to Pinterest to access the predominately female audience – women comprise of about 82% of active users on Pinterest, according to Google Ad Planner. There are plenty of brands actively pinning, such as Kate Spade, Whole Foods and Etsy, and their audiences are sizeable. But major consumer brands like Coca Cola, Oreo and H&M haven’t yet embraced pinning.

There are a few reasons why they might be reluctant to start pinning – firstly not all brands are visual and of course some brands will want to wait and see to take the best practice from predecessors. One of the more pressing reasons may be the lack of substantial ROI measures in place. However influence measuring tools such as Klout look into influence and reach on other social platforms, and Pinterest do have a number of tools in place to do just that:

There’s Pinpuff, a new web app that invites users who ‘love Pinterest’ to calculate their ‘Pinfluence’. The application measures the reach and influence of the user’s pins and the traffic it generates. Despite constant comparisons to Klout PinPuff state clearly that they want to explore Pinners via score and interest, so you can find who is worth noticing in various fields. If they’re successful in doing so then they will be delivering real tangible insight for users and will thrive where Klout fell short.

We also looked at PinReach (formerly known as PinClout). As it currently stands PinReach covers overall statistics of Pinterest, identifying your main influencers, trends and social impact with a simple to understand single reach score for each section. Both tools work in delivering basic influencer statistics and information to users in an easy, non-complicated format. But this is all they really do. They fail to offer any substantial influencer statistics as things stand; hopefully as Pinterest grows and bigger brands join perhaps these tools will develop further.

We’ll certainly be watching to see how these influence tools develop.

***EVENT***

Neoco will be running a Pinterest event to help brands understand more about how to use the new platform, best practice and tips. Get in touch with your Account Manager or Benn if you want to come along’