Over the past few months, activity on the social network Pinterest has exploded.

Pinterest is focused on the lifestyles of its members and encourages them to create different virtual pinboards onto which they can ‘pin’ things they like.

From September to December 2011, unique visitors to pinterest.com increased by a staggering 429% and over 3.3.million people have signed up to the website so far. In fact, it’s recently been announced that Pinterest has more than 11 million monthly visitors, making it the fastest website to surpass the 10 million mark.

The value of Pinterest to brands?

The demographics of Pinterest are particularly interesting for brands – an impressive 80% of users are women, and 55% of these are aged between 25 to 44.

So what does this suggest? Well, if you’re a brand targeting this demographic, you might want to start thinking about whether you should be on Pinterest.

Interestingly, Pinterest states in its terms and conditions that it is not a platform for self-promotion, but an online space for members to share their lifestyle, tastes and interests.

This means that (as with any social media platform) if you’re considering creating a Pinterest account for your brand, it’s worth putting a lot of thought into it beforehand, as part of an overall social media strategy. Whilst it might be okay to have a board dedicated to your current collection, the idea is that you will curate a wider selection of images and videos which tell the story behind your brand. You shouldn’t just be pushing product, but showing the lifestyle which is associated with that product.

How brands can use Pinterest

So for example, if you are a stationery company, you could have boards dedicated to doodles, great calligraphy or fun origami as well as those showcasing your best products. These do not have to come from you, but are just a curated collection of images which are already out there on the web.

The fact that Pinterest doesn’t have to be so focused on your brand may be intimidating for some – especially if you don’t have a concrete idea about who your target demographic is or what you’re trying to communicate to your customers. However, it also provides a lot of scope for some really fun social media marketing. Indeed, Pinterest even allows you to have other people contributing to your boards, which means that members can create user-generated fan content for your account if you wish.

With the freedom to use fresh content which isn’t necessarily generated from your design team, you can really investigate the different personalities of your brand. That could be anything from a pinboard dedicated to your employees favourite things, to one exploring where your products are made. Let your imagination go wild and dig deep into which niches your brand could become a Pinterest expert on.

Finally, don’t forget what your brand Pinterest account is ultimately there for. Whether you’re wanting to encourage online sales of your product or just looking to experiment, make sure you drive users back to your website and track the results. After all, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

Image via Wikipedia

According to research from a team at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, we think that 25% of tweets are not worth reading. The study found that, when asked to rate tweets by people they follow, only 36% of tweets were marked favourably, 25% were marked less favourably and the balance (39%) received no strong feeling either way. Press coverage of this study has invariably interpreted this to mean that up to a quarter of what we say on Twitter is a waste of time (see the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph coverage of the research).

The research itself asked users to self-nominate themselves to take part and, in exchange for having their own tweets rated, we asked to rate samples of tweets from people they follow. As with much academic research, this does take them out of their normal context when using Twitter but the results are interesting and informative. Maybe not for the interpretation that is taken by some of those reporting on it, but for what it tells us about how we use Twitter. Or perhaps how it reinforces what we should already know.

People are not interested in everything that people say on Twitter. They are not even interested in everything that the people they choose to follow say. There should be nothing surprising or controversial about this. It is fairly normal in all our social interactions that we are more interested in some things and less interested in others. I’m mainly surprised that we are uninterested in only 25% of things that people we follow say on Twitter.

Twitter is a classic social network. People who use it by following people (rather than by following hashtags or search strings) make a choice about who to follow based on who they are, what they say in their biography and perhaps some of their tweets at the time that we choose to follow them. I am unlikely to share everything in common with them – I may be interested in their tweets about BBC Question Time on a Thursday, for example, but less interested in their Tweets about the Super Bowl. I am unlikely to find you interesting all the time. And that’s nothing personal. And nothing unusual.

So as a reader I am unlikely to find everything that anybody says on Twitter interesting – I mentally filter out what I want to read and what I don’t want to read. If I really don’t want to read things on a certain topic, I can always filter it out with Tweetdeck or the like.

Just as readers are not necessarily interested in reading everything, those who write tweets are not necessarily writing them to be read. There is a clear disconnect between the person writing the tweets and the people reading them. The writer is not (in most cases) thinking about who will be reading it and why. They are just saying something. Saying it because they want to. That in itself is motivation and on the rare occasion that a tweet will be retweeted or responded to they will get further gratification.

So we are not interested in everything even our closest friends say (probably true in real life and on Twitter). And people are often writing on Twitter for the act of writing something and not necessrily composing it for specific audience or a specific reaction. Given that most people follow a collection of people with many different interests, some of whom they know and some of whom they don’t, it surprises me that only 1 in 4 tweets that we see are not of interest to us. This study certainly doesn’t show that those Tweets are a waste of time.

With seven in ten brands saying they plan to increase their presence across social media in 2012 (according to a recent survey by Awareness) we thought it would be a good idea to take a regular look at the current social media landscape.

So here’s a quick run down of  what we think has been hot in social media this January:

1. Farfetch.com – the future of social retail?

2012 looks set to be the year of the social online retailer. Luxury retailer farfetch.com announced that it saw a 73% rise in traffic from Facebook in the second half of 2011 and it recently raised a second round of funding to the tune of $18m.

And it’s not just luxury online retailers who are seeing the value of social. As part of its strategy to encourage social shopping, fab.com launched its live feed for members to easily check out what others are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing – all in real time.

Just 7 months since launching, fab.com already has 1.4m members – over half of which have joined as a result of social sharing, so it clearly makes business sense to encourage this channel.

2. KLM and Scandinavian Airlines encourage social flying

Following on from their popular ‘Surprise’ campaign, KLM are getting even more social by launching their ‘Meet and Seat’ campaign. The idea is that when customers book flights, they have the option of creating a public profile and then choosing who they sit next to on the plane. Romantic stuff or creepy as hell? You decide.

Scandinavian Airlines has also got in on the act by encouraging members to use their air miles by booking flights together. Their ‘Couple up, to buckle up’ campaign shared QR codes with members who had to put their phones together in order to access a unique 2 for 1 booking code.

3. Soundcloud gives Instagram a personal touch

It looks like sound hosting just got interesting with the launch of Soundcloud’s new slideshow app, ‘Story Wheel’,this month. The idea behind ‘Story Wheel’ is that members can look through their Instagram photos and record an audio description to go with them. The effect is an old-school slide-show with a personal soundtrack – you can see the founders of Soundcloud’s own version here.

Audio-hosting platform Soundcloud has grown by about 1 million members in the last couple of months and is now fully integrated with Facebook. This month, it reached a milestone of 10 million users, so diversifying their offering is a smart move to show that sound can make images that bit more personal.

With such a large audience behind them, perhaps now may be the time for brands to think about how they can use audio-hosting as part of their social media strategy.

Into the valley of Death

The Crimean War of the 1850s was a revolution in communication. For the first time reports from the battlefield were returned in what felt like near-real-time thanks to the electric telegraph transmitting messages in just hours rather than them having to be sent by horse across Europe. Many people complained about the impact of this real-time news, and the harm that it did reporting on the events tragedies of the war as they happened.

Perhaps more contentious, however, than this written word reporting was the use, for the first time, of war photography with photographs from Roger Fenton showing the real detail of what was happening. Whereas once newspapers had to rely on words, etchings and drawings to report what was happening, they could now show actual photos of war, of people and of suffering. Photos proved to be more powerful than even the real-time written word back in the 1850s.

If 2011 was the year Twitter and citizen journalism came of age, 2012 is set to be the year that social photography comes of age. And it could be even more powerful.

Whilst we have been used to Facebook focusing on photography for some time, that platform is more often about sharing photos with a (relatively) close group of friends. Family events, babies, parties, special holidays. These kind of events are very personal and reflect the nature of Facebook – where you (broadly speaking) network with people that you know or that you have chosen to share personal connections with. The growth of photography in more public social networks and online communities is more nascent, but is one of the most interesting and powerful areas where social is developing.

Photography is different. It allows you to share a moment and allows you to give people a real insider view of what you are doing or what is happening. It also travels across linguistic boundaries with ease. For individuals, photography is a simple way of sharing what you are doing, capturing the essence of your life at a particular moment and sharing that with others. It often has more social currency than the written word (especially than the written Tweet) – imagine trying to describe what is happening in any photograph in a single tweet and you will see it conveys so much more ‘information-per-instance’. It can also be appreciated on a number of different levels – the content of the photograph, the moment it is capturing, the framing, the use of colour – increasing its value and shareability to different people and different communities.

Brands and celebrities can also benefit from photographs. There is still a huge amount of social currency in going ‘behind the scenes’ – allowing people to see things that they cannot normally see. Because of the high rate of ‘information-per-instance’, a photograph can often give people much more than endless status updates or Tweets. For celebrities, it is a way of letting people into your lives (and controlling this) – imagine the power of you sharing your own holiday photos or photos of your weekend. People will consume this content avidly as it provides what feels like real access to their lives (just look at Justin Bieber or Barack Obama on Instagram). Brands can also benefit from using photographs in the same way to show behind the scenes and to control the access people get into events, decisions and the brand itself from Starbucks sharing photos from stores worldwide, to Tiffany & Co showing people what happens behind the scenes to their jewellery and diamonds.

Photography offers real power to individuals, celebrities and brands to capture and share much more information that can easily be shared in a written Tweet. It allows you a window into what they are doing and seeing right now and can be shared easily between communities and across borders. 2011 saw the rise of camera phones and more importantly of social photo sharing apps – notably Instagram – which lower the barriers to social photography. As these continue to rise in popularity and usage in 2012, we should expect to see more photography shared by more people.

Whereas 2011 saw people getting used to messages from Twitter being used in traditional media (from newspapers and TV reports) we should expect 2012 to be the year of social photography. Bringing insights into events around the world through photographs and showing, as Roger Fenton did in the Crimean war, the power of photography alongside the written word.

Capital One and American Express are the top financial services brands on Facebook, according to a chart compiled by social media analytics tool socialbakers.

While Capital One’s Facebook page features within the top 150 brands on this list, and the American Express Facebook page is just outside it, the next most successful financial services brand on Facebook is US based direct banking and payment services company Discover, which charts at the 300 mark, saying a lot about the use of Facebook among global financial services brands.

In fact, this forms a large part of the reason why Capital One and American Express are the top financial services brands on Facebook  - it’s the fact that they are on and engaging with their audience in the first place.

Plus, as both brands are credit card providers they have the opportunity to engage their audience with content that is not directly related to the financial world, ie, topics  related to the deals they have secured with other travel and leisure brands for example, or discussing areas where their customers and prospects may choose to put the spend on credit cards, like holidays or cars.

Using socialbakers to dig a bit deeper into the content and engagement strategy for both Capital One and and American Express reveals some interesting results.

An overview (to the left) of both Facebook pages shows that Capital One has 125, 813 more fans than American Express, which, in the grand scheme of things of the total number of fans they both have, is not that much of  a difference.

However, looking at the  ”people talking about” and engagement rate levels is where things get interesting.

American Express has over 10 times the number of people talking about them than Capital One, and an engagement rate that is triple that of Capital One. In fact, as the chart below shows, Capital One’s “people talking about” rate seems to be consistently low, with little sign of improving:

What’s interesting to note is that American Express had a similar level of “people talking about” to Capital One until a staggered increase from 15th December 2011 onwards and then a massive peak, and then subsequent slower increase,  from 23rd January this year.

The reason for this dramatic climb was likely to be the Facebook status update that advance tickets to the 2012 NBA All-Star Jam Session were available to all American Express Cardmembers.

In actual fact, it’s status updates along these lines that are the key driver for American Express’ high engagement levels. They don’t post regularly, and in fact have only posted content 5 times since the start of 2012, but their status updates are carefully crafted to ensure maximum engagement by highlighting the benefits of being an American Express cardholder.

In the mean time, ever since early September, Capital One has let their content strategy dip completely and they have  barely posted anything since. Previously posting regular content, almost on a daily basis, has probably helped to keep their ranking quite high in the socialbakers chart, but I wonder how much longer this will be the case. Their most recent post, back in early December read:

And having not posted since suggests some kind of unresolved technical or social media management error. This is not a good post to leave hanging at the top of the feed and someone from Capital One would do well to look into resolving the issue and adding new content, rather than leaving the page hanging.

With only one financial services brand in socialbakers top 150 Facebook pages chart it will be interesting to note how many other financial services brands start engaging through Facebook, and whether they have the same success as the likes of American Express.