(SOCIAL) Pinterest And Top 40 Radio

8-27-2012

There?s a reason so many brands and businesses are creating a marketing strategy just for Pinterest: It?s a huge traffic driver. Recent statistics show it provides more referral traffic to other websites than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined.

Whether you?re a blogger, a retail boutique, or a radio station, traffic to your website is important. Web traffic makes advertisers happy, and your station may gain new listeners within and outside your market from Pinterest referrals. If your website content is good, those visitors may become regulars. They might listen online, and again in the car when they head to work the next morning. They might even pin your content, increasing your reach yet again.

Almost 70 percent of Pinterest users are female. Fifty percent have children. The age demographic is varied, with 27 percent 25-34, 29 percent 35-44, and 24 percent 45-54. The site receives almost 1.5 million visitors every day, with users spending an average of almost 16 minutes per visit (exceeding Facebook?s 12.1 minutes).

Both the demographics and the power of Pinterest as a referral source make it perfect for Top 40 radio. But the nature of Pinterest is different from other platforms. Show up and do what you do on Facebook or Twitter, and you?re destined to fail. Treat Pinterest as a ?what?s in it for her? experience, and you?ll be rewarded with the virality of repins, an increase in Web traffic, engaged listeners, and happy clients. Embrace The Top 40 Lifestyle: Get In Her Head Define your station?s target listener. Go beyond age and gender to determine what she does during a typical day.What are her interests? What are her problems?  Defining these will help you create a content strategy for your station?s Pinterest account.

Eighty percent of pins are repins, meaning Pinterest users are browsing to curate content from pinners they follow (and not always to create organic pins from the Web). This could be thrilling or damaging, depending on the strength of your station?s content. The pro: There is a strong chance your content will be repinned if it?s good. The con: Station-centric content can?t be your focus. You won?t gain any followers, as only the most devoted P1s will repin a promotional image or DJ blog. Users are looking for content they can identify with to repin as a form of self-expression, or content they can come back to later, like household tips, recipes, or products to purchase.

The most popular categories on Pinterest are Home, Arts and Crafts, Fashion, and Food. Use your listener profile to expand your strategy beyond these. If 50 percent of Pinterest users have kids, and many Top 40 listeners do too, create content for moms. Pin family-friendly events from your website?s events calendar to a Pinterest board for your mama listeners, or create a fitness board to help new moms lose weight. Follow the example of WSTR (Star 94)/Atlanta and pin cute kid pics. Use Pinterest to drive traffic back to your website, too, by creating boards that represent features on your website ? for example, a ?Sleaze Board,? where you can pin entertainment and pop culture news from the station website and other sources.Add content to your website with the ?Pinterest mindset? to ensure stories, promotions, and events have an attractive image to pin. Use teases to ensure your followers will read the full story on your site. While it?s essential to pin like a listener, don?t forget to include content expected from a radio station. Create boards for music you play, concerts in your market, personality blogs, and more.

Can You Sell It? I haven?t seen a station get a pin or board sponsored yet, but I believe you can. Pinterest is all about visual content. Be picky about which clients you partner with, and choose based on the custom visual content you can provide. If you?re weaving clients into a well-developed content strategy, listeners won?t care that some content is sponsored. Weddings are a hot category on Pinterest. Partner with a local wedding boutique to share wedding and bridesmaids? dresses. Pin their images (with a link to the boutique?s site) over a period of time, mingled with other wedding content, like catering and music. You could include a pinned coupon, or a repin promotion to win one of the dresses pinned. Create the content idea first, with your demo in mind, then present it to the client. And be protective of your Pinterest account so it doesn?t become a dumping ground for client products and events.

Your followers on Pinterest will be paramount to any future success you have with clients. So create a content strategy and get pinning first, to establish your station as a ?pinner to follow.? Need help? An intern (ahem, ?pintern?) in your demo might not be a bad idea.

Stephanie Winans is a Social Media Strategist and Content Curator for the Randy Lane Company and Stephanie Winans Digital. Learn more at stephaniewinans.com or e-mail her at stephaniewinans@gmail.com.

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DIGITAL)Which Formats Should Be On Pinterest?

4-12-2012

 The hottest, fastest-growing social media site is Pinterest. It?s now the third-most popular social network, behind Facebook and Twitter. It?s also a potentially great way for some radio brands to bond more deeply with their fans. However, jump in with your eyes open:

1. Unlike Facebook, Pinterest is really not for every brand.
2. It?s clean and graphically oriented. Hence, unfamiliar territory for many radio pros!
3. It?s even less like traditional marketing than Facebook, meaning you can?t make it a place you just post your promo liners.

Who And What
If your radio station targets adult women, Pinterest may be perfect for you. That?s who?s joining and spending time there. Country, Adult Contemporary (hot and mainstream), Urban AC, and Classic Hits formats all might have some real success with Pinterest. You have to turn off your traditional marketing brain, however, and start by looking at the site. It?s a free-flowing blend of photos, artwork, and videos. This is very soft marketing. There are some brands getting very healthy traffic from Pinterest, but they?re telling a story about their target?s lifestyle, or emotionally connecting with them. This is not the place to just promote your morning show or cash contest.

Furthermore, you have to look good on Pinterest. You can?t just turn this over to the DJ staff and know it?ll be done right. I?ll give you some good ideas here on what you can post, but I?d recommend finding maybe just one person on your team who understands Pinterest, and can come up with the best content.

Idea #1: Lifestyle
What can you tell your adult female target audience about themselves? Often, they?re busy working moms who are time-starved but would like to have more fun. A way you could involve a client might be to post ?dream? content. What would they like to have? Where would they like to go? What would a special, fun time with family or friends look like? You can come up with theme after theme to entertain your target on Pinterest that might tie in all sorts of client opportunities.

Idea #2: Inside Experience
Social media fans like to get extra access to their favorite brands. On Pinterest, that might mean candid photos of what it?s like to work at your station. No, no posed shots of the smiling morning team. Show people what it really looks like, all over the office. Keep this updated, and you can put links on your website and Facebook page to get more fans on Pinterest.

Idea #3: Cute Or Hot
Move those cute pet and hot firefighter galleries off your website and onto Pinterest. If you?re an established brand, it should result in more brand loyalty and more clicks to your website. Plus, if you do a cute pet board at Pinterest, include a pic of a vet clinic client treating a pet. See how you can tie in a client without just adding another advertising message? Surely you have clients who would fit, graphically, in a display of pictures that reinforce what your listeners love about their lives.

Idea #4: Fan Community
Get your fans to post their own photos of what they?re doing when they listen to you. Wherever they are, whatever they?re doing, whoever is around them, other fans will find it relatable. There?s no reason only your brand gets to share the love; you could find clients to take pictures of what they?re doing with your station on. Remember, this is velvet glove stuff. It?s soft marketing, but powerful.

Idea #5: Contest
Run a contest for your Pinterest followers where you ask them to post one of your images on one of their boards. Here?s a soft, powerful way for them to endorse you: by posting an attractive photo that incorporates your logo somehow. Make sure you read Pinterest?s terms of service before doing this.

How The Pieces Fit
If you are a female-skewing station and you decide Pinterest is for you, here?s how the digital pieces fit together. Your website is where people go for deep, focused content about what you did on the radio. Your Facebook page is the behind-the-scenes pass for your biggest fans, clueing them into what?s happening, and when, on all your platforms. Then, Pinterest is where you show your audience more of what they?re passionate about.

Chris Miller has been a major-market PD in Atlanta, Portland and Cleveland. He now operates Chris Miller Digital, which he launched. Visit his website at www.chrismillerdigital.com.

Contact Chris via e-mail, chris@chrismillerdigital.com or 216-236-3955.

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(DIGITAL) Pinterest: Oh God Not Another One!

Pinterest: Oh God Not Another One!
(by Mike Stiles) 

So we start out with a rather unique concept that took off like a rocket, Facebook.  With over 800 million users globally, it is still without question the biggest dog in the pound.  And with an IPO expected this week, the sudden creation of numerous millionaires will probably remind us all of the power of a brilliant idea well executed.

Then there?s Twitter, a platform driven by users who tweet short bursts of activity to faithful followers who care.  It was a concept different from Facebook, and worked.  Today, we have Facebook incorporating Twitter-like functionalities (the Ticker), and Twitter taking more steps toward expanding into more Facebook-like functionalities.  Both brands seem to be moving toward a world in which the other one isn?t necessary.

Along comes Google+, roaring out of the gate with all the power and cache that Google brings.  Its differentiators were that contacts could be organized into circles (as opposed to groups?), and the Google+ platform would capitalize on all the existing powerful Google tools, all working together.  Google+ numbers are steadily going up but?adoption has not exactly been overwhelmingly vast or rapid.

Into that environment, what other social network could possibly introduce itself and gain any attention or traction with users at all?  Pinterest.  That?s right, yet another social network that we have to assess and decide whether or not it?s a sandbox our stations need to play in.

In as small a nutshell as I can get it, 2-year-old Pinterest is a social bookmarking site.  You see something you like on the web, you ?pin? it to your board so other people can see it and go to it.  It?s very visually driven?lots of pictures, hardly any copy.  Women make up 58% of the traffic, so they?re loving it.  Traffic quadrupled from September to December to 7.51 million unique visitors just in December.  Retailers also love it.  Pinterest has become a top 5 referrer for several apparel retailers.  This infographic tells you the story.  Visually of course.

So here?s my take.  Pinterest is proving itself as a potentially successful driver of social commerce (I say potentially because no data bears out the conversion rate to sales of Pinterest referrals).  While the site is plenty sticky and users spend lots of time on it, its value is that it sends people to other sites to buy the pretty clothes or whatever they saw a picture of.  At its root, it?s a catalogue.  And people, especially women, like looking through pictures in a catalogue.  The site is also set up to find quick and easy gift ideas, categorized by price.

As a radio station, you?re dealing primarily in audio content, not visual.  And you?re not selling anything direct to the public.  You sell ads to businesses.  So as much of a social network lover and proponent as I am, this time I can say you can sleep like a baby if you haven?t established a Pinterest presence or are executing a Pinterest strategy.  If you want to play on it, if you want to create boards, if you want listeners to be able to follow what you pin on your boards for fun?knock your lights out.  But is it as critical for the deepening of the relationships between your station and your listeners as Facebook and Twitter?  Nope.

Now if you?ll excuse me I have a floral sundress to buy.

Mike Stiles is a brand content specialist with the social marketing tech platform, Vitrue. Check out his monologue blog, The Stiles Files & follow him @mikestiles

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