Chances are you’ve heard about Pinterest. It’s almost more of a surprise if you haven’t heard of it, considering how much buzz it’s had lately. But before you start considering a marketing strategy around the popular virtual pinboard app for iTunes, the results of a recent study from Experian have something for you to consider: less than half of consumers studied have a Pinterest account.
The numbers are telling in their own right; Experian, rather their subsidiary PriceGrabber, launched a survey comprised of responses from 4,851 online shoppers, about the use of Pinterest. The top pin item for Pinterest users is cooking inspirations like recipes, followed closely by home decorating and craft ideas, with shopping, entertaining, and gardening ideas following quickly after. Most users log in less than daily, with only ten percent signing on more than once per day, and 37 percent signing on a few times a week.
But here’s the part that will really get you: 58 percent of respondents said they don’t have an account. And of that 58 percent, 89 percent of them have absolutely no intention of signing up for one. And 32 percent of the whole–almost one in three–don’t even know what Pinterest is.
Naturally, the results are telling, and give a very nice clear picture of whether or not you should invest time, money and effort into setting up Pinterest for your small business. First, if you’re involved in any kind of food preparation and want to give out a recipe or two–not necessarily one of your own, of course, but something comparable–then Pinterest would likely be a good idea to get involved in. Same too if you do anything involving the major areas in which people work with Pinterest like home decor or entertaining. But if you’re not working with something that Pinterest users are already working with, then it would be a good idea to, at least for now, stay out of it. You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to using social networking, and thus, it’s not a good idea to go after every option, as you won’t be able to put the necessary focus in the right ones. But in the right market segment, you may well get a whole lot more value out of using Pinterest ahead of everything else.
And, any time you go after more customers, and new customers, alike, you’ll need to augment that increased customer flow with some useful cloud-based telephony tools, especially things that make contacting you easier like find-me, follow-me to keep customers easily connected to their best point of contact, and hunt groups to ensure no one stays out of contact for any longer than strictly necessary.
So unless you’re in a very select group of businesses, you may want to stay out of Pinterest for the immediate future. But there are plenty of industries that would welcome such a development, and if you’re in one of those groups, you should probably plan accordingly.