[ibimage==19620==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-right]We don’t all have tons of time to devote to every social network out there. But as the second most popular social media site after Facebook, regardless of what your business is, Pinterest is one of the few worth spending time on. No matter where your focus lies, your business has a place on Pinterest.
Viewpoints.com just entered the Pinterest world a few months ago, and we have been trying to increase our presence ever since. We developed a number of boards, including ones that feature the appliances you’d want in your dream kitchen, cool electronics and gadgets and even new products to keep consumers on the pulse of what’s new on the market.
Setting up our Pinterest contest
After attending a Pinterest panel with some influential speakers, we decided if they could hold a Pinterest contest, so could we. After a bit more research, the plans were in place. We decided on a Pin It to Win It Contest - always a favorite because the winner gets to pick the prize.
We created a Pinterest board linking to contest details on how to enter as well as rules and regulations. We also included a number of pins on the board as an example to users to get them started. Users had to create their own unique board and use the hashtag #viewpoints in their captions, which proved to be far more challenging than we expected.
We emailed details about the contest to a select number of our members and also posted the contest to all of our social networks. We saw results immediately.
Why the contest was successful
Our goals going into the contest were to increase our Pinterest following, extend our brand name, grow traffic to our site and really engage with users. Not only did we get 800 total repins over the course of the week the contest ran, but we also grew our number of Pinterest followers by about 400. I’ve also been noticing more repinning than usual now that the contest is over, which probably means we have successfully expanded our audience to fans who really care what we have to say.
Is the contest going to get you all really high-quality followers who convert to users on your site? Absolutely not. Many of them are just in it to win the prize, and you can tell from one glance at their Pinterest boards. But there are a number of legitimate users who will share your contest with family or friends, expanding your audience to more people who might be interested in using your service.
Lessons learned
There are a handful of issues that came up - some of them the day the contest launched. I immediately found out that Pinterest search is terrible, so don’t rely on looking for a hashtag or boards through Pinterest. We also found that having multiple steps to enter contest is often disastrous. Next time, we would most likely just have people email in links to their Pinterest boards, as that is the one sure way of tracking it down. Making participants create separate contest boards is just asking them to delete it once the contest ends. You want them to leave these pins on their boards forever.
We learned that spammers are out there, and they will try to win however they can. Luckily, a clause in our terms & conditions protected us against giving them the prize. We ended up using Pinfluencer to track the participants with the most repins and to choose a winner. We also got some great stats on our contest board from this site. You can even export your results to an Excel spreadsheet to really analyze and save who your participants are.
My advice: Create your own Pinterest contest while it’s fast and easy, before Pinterest establishes strict guidelines like Facebook did. The simpler, the better. And an amazing prize - like the $500 Hamilton Beach Commercial Stand Mixer we gave away - doesn’t hurt either.
