Pinterest is growing rapidly, with more monthly usage than Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ combined. Time spent on the site averages 77 minutes, compared to Facebook’s 10 minutes.
Whole Foods (WF) didn’t just pin randomly to create their robust community of followers. They had a system:
- Growing the community. WF devised a video series for its boards on such topics as urban farming which did not focus on their brand: the aim was to tie the brand to specific food cultures. The urban farming board was entitled: “How does your garden grow?”
- Keeping their board topics broad to pull in more people: vegetarians, gardeners, “shop locally” proponents, etc. They built on their broad base by creating boards that were Whole Foods Market-related, like products or recipes using the brand’s products.
- Fewer boards with more content vs. numerous boards with fewer pins: They used keywords to find the most popular topics.
- Using images to drive traffic to the website: Photos of dishes were repinned often and the recipe ingredients linked to the WF website.
- Story telling: WF raises funds for the Whole Planet Foundation, which helps farmers in developing countries through microcredit transactions. Defining this organization was helped by using maps, showing people who benefited from the program and pictures of their food products.
- Infographics: Were popular repins, so they expanded their content by adding text to their photos.
- Collaboration: Pinterest is for people to share based on what they love. As accounts followed each other, they added to each one’s boards. WF partnered with them to produce events.
Think about how your company or organization can take advantage of this growing social media tool. Remember the old saying: A picture is worth a thousand words.