Case study: creative use of Pinterest. Teri MacInnes Digital Marketing Officer Glasgow Clyde College

Transcription

1 Case study: creative use of Pinterest Teri MacInnes Digital Marketing Officer Glasgow Clyde College

2 Gold Award for Digital Marketing at the College Development Network Marketing Awards 2014

3 What is Pinterest?

4 What is Pinterest? An online pin board that enables users to create virtual boards and pin images and videos they like (econsultancy.com) It helps people discover creative ideas and save them for later (Pinterest co founder, Evan Sharp) Search tool rather than social tool

5 Some Pinteresting facts Launched in 2010 One of world s fastest growing websites (Alexa.com) 100 million monthly users (Pinterest) Fastest growing social media platform it nearly doubled its active users in 2014 (GlobalWebIndex)

6 Some Pinteresting facts (continued) Highly engaged user base Users spend more time on Pinterest than other platforms (comscore.com)

7 Some Pinteresting facts (continued) Drives three times more referral traffic than Twitter (mashable.com) Drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined (econsultancy.com) 80% of users are on the move. As it is visual and easy to scan it s perfect for mobile. You could argue that other social media platforms like Facebook have copied Pinterest (econsultancy.com)

8 Who uses Pinterest?

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10 Pinterest Demographics gender female users: 68.2% (comscore.com) male users: 31.8% (comscore.com)

11 Pinterest Demographics age Majority of users are aged (comscore.com) 21% are aged (comscore.com)

12 Pinterest in the UK 10 million active user in the UK (Pinterest) Pinterest is becoming a key social media player

13 Pinterest in the UK (continued) fastest growing social media platform in the UK (GlobalWebIndex) doubled its active users in the UK in 2014 (GlobalWebIndex)

14 How does Glasgow Clyde College use Pinterest?

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16 Overview Glasgow Clyde College uses Pinterest to showcase the work of its Creative Industries students 20 boards from subjects including photography, fashion design, millinery, textiles and jewellery The work featured on the boards range from evening classes to HN student work. 836 pins and 305 followers key part of the Glasgow Clyde College s social media strategy

17 Objectives Effectively showcase the College s creative students work Engage with potential students, students, the creative industries, the media and bloggers Enhance ongoing search engine optimisation work by providing increased inbound links from an external Increase referral traffic to glasgowclyde.ac.uk and specifically the course pages of the courses whose work is featured on Pinterest Position Glasgow Clyde College as a leader in Creative Industries provision Cross sell other creative courses to website course page visitors by direction to the College s Pinterest account

18 Target Audience Potential students (full time, part time and evening) Students Creative industries Media and bloggers Anyone interested in photography, fashion, jewellery or the visual arts taught at Glasgow Clyde College

19 Approach Pinterest complements existing social channels Effective way to reach our target audience because it is visually stimulating and many influencers such as fashion bloggers and designers use the platform Usability is simple and easily accessed via mobile devices, as illustrated by the millions of users worldwide

20 Cost and Production Free to use tool with no fixed costs to set up Photography commissioned for a range of other purposes, such as a fashion show photo shoot, or images of Higher Photography students work, so no additional costs have been incurred. Cost of production was time to set up the Pinterest account Each board has to be set up individually and the images uploaded

21 Production Created the Pinterest account Images were provided either by the course lecturers or from photo shoots organised by the Marketing team for a variety of promotional uses Most pins includes keywords such as the name of the course to improve search rankings for glasgowclyde.ac.uk Most pins links back to the relevant course page to improve referral traffic to glasgowclyde.ac.uk A member of the lecturing staff also has access to the account and has uploaded images themselves.

22 Promotion The Pinterest account was promoted online and during relevant course promotion throughout the year We embedded a Pinterest plugin onto every relevant course page, enabling us to insert a relevant board. On clicking this and transferring through to Pinterest, the viewer will also be exposed to the other boards that exhibit College work.

23 Promotion (continued)

24 Evaluation measuring success Since launch, the account has gone from zero to 836 pins 305 active followers (includes influencers such as designers, stylists and bloggers) Average of 425 daily impressions and 15 unique viewers Engaging with target audiences: images have been pinned 546 times by students, potential students and bloggers Positioning the College as a creative leader: Glasgow Clyde College is the only college in Scotland to use Pinterest purely promote its Creative Industries provision

25 Evaluation Measuring Success Increasing inbound links and web referral traffic: Pinterest is the fourth most frequent social media referral source with 165 sessions coming directly from Pinterest in the past year. Cross selling other creative courses: course pages have been updated with a visual link back to the College s Pinterest account, which contains the boards from a range of other courses.

26 Future plans for updating The success of the Pinterest account has made it a feature of the College s social media strategy going forward Where a course produces visually engaging content, Marketing encourages the use of the Glasgow Clyde College Pinterest account as a communications tool, which can be used in marketing Teaching staff are also using boards to pin inspirational material for existing class groups, for example ideas for textiles students.

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28 Questions?

29 Thank you!