Using Pinterest Analytics to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

High quality content has always been the number-one concern, and while it still remains a high priority, what you do after you publish is equally important to ensuring your content’s success. Promoting your content on social media and measuring its performance can help you focus your content and make sure it’s resonating with your target audience. While Facebook and Twitter remain at the top of the social media ladder, Pinterest has shown itself to be equally, if not more valuable to content marketing.

To begin with, Pinterest is a platform based on sharing and bookmarking content in a social format; by design it’s meant to bring people together through a love of shared interests, making it ideal for finding and reaching out to niche audiences. By paying attention to Pinterest Analytics at every stage of content creation, you can create a strategy to maximize your outreach.

Track Pinning Trends

Before you even begin creating content, look to Pinterest for inspiration. Find out what category most of your pins fall under and study what’s trending. Understanding the topics that are most popular can help you develop relevant content from the outset. Consider these tips when brainstorming content based off Pinterest pins:

1. What content is pinned most in your category? What has the most number of repins? Likes?

2. Find out which boards in your niche have the greatest number of followers and mimic them. Create boards with similar quality pins to establish a following, then begin pinning your own content.

3. Infographics and pinned articles make for great repurposed content. Share them on your site, pin them, and then let them as inspiration for later content. Write an editorial or create a rebuttal infographic, and then share.

4. Does a particular type of content get comments?

One of the most important things to do promote your content on any social media site is to start conversation. This is more difficult on Pinterest, where a quick press of the “Pin It!” button is as far as most people will interact with a single piece of content. However, by presenting multiple, informative pins on the same subject, you increase the chances of your content being shared and your boards being followed.

In fact, although retweets on Twitter make up less than 2% of all tweets, on Pinterest repins make up nearly 80% of all activity. This means that your content can reach a wider audience on Pinterest than on any other social site.

Take Advantage of Pinterest Analytics

Once you’ve begun publishing and pinning content, you need to have a clear understanding of how that content is performing. To do this you should take advantage of the variety of analytics tools available.

While free Pinterest analytics are available with a business account, for a better range of metrics you want to look at Pinleague. With Pinleauge you can not only track the popularity of pins that you’ve put on Pinterest yourself, but it also allows you to track images that are currently on your website. You can find out if others have pinned any of your images, how many times they have been pinned or repinned, and by whom. It’s an impressive tool to help measure the success of your content on two fronts. These analytics can also be used to gain insight into your followers. Take your data from Pinleague and compare it to information gleaned from Google Analytics or benchmarking tools like Cyfe, another great tool that tracks real-time metrics across a variety of social media sites.  Google Analytics and Cyfe are great for just general information, for example, how many followers you have or how many visitors from Pinterest, but for real, in-depth analytics based on your Pinterest followers and account, your only choice is Pinleague.

Using this tool you can see where your content is gaining the most traction and what is getting shared, and then hone your content based on that information.

Be sure to look at such metrics as bounce rate, page visits, time on site, etc., to determine whether or not your content is doing its work to drive traffic and conversions.

Once you have a sense of your Pinterest demographics, you can create customer Personas for each niche audience and develop separate content strategies that are tailored to their interests. In the same vein, if a particular piece of content does well on Pinterest, any content you develop on that subject in the future should obviously have a strong visual element and/or quality graphics.

There are so many ways that you can utilize Pinterest for content creation and promotion, but by taking advantage of Pinleague you will be able to take your content marketing strategy to the next level. You will not only reach out to and directly address your target audience with relevant, valuable content, but you can continually adapt to make sure that your voice rises above all the rest.

Marcela De Vivo is the CEO of Gryffin Media, a digital marketing agency specializing in content marketing and social media marketing.  She loves to write about all things Pinterest, and loves using her knowledge to help companies grow.