Social media is important for generating traffic and creating awareness for your website and brand, and with the ever growing amount of social platforms to choose from, I have a question .. Is Pinterest the best?
Facebook and Twitter are of course very popular and may still be the chosen ones, but there are several other platforms that are biting at their heels, and I have noticed something that I was not expecting when looking at which one has been performing the best when it comes to getting eyes to my website.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
The most important thing for any website is to get traffic, and social media is a way of generating traffic, it is great for getting your brand seen and building a following, so it has to be part of any marketing strategy online. Is Facebook still the leader and the platform to concentrate on when you are working with social media?
I am not talking about advertising on any of these platforms, we all know that Facebook is getting a lot of people good results with their ads. This is purely about the amount of traffic that comes from these sites just from sharing your content and brand through posting on the various social platforms.
I am going to compare Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for this particular post, but I do intend to look at other platforms in the future, one I have in mind is Intstagram.
Before we look at my findings, here is a short video I made to go with this post ..
The Social Giant
I think it is a well known fact that Facebook is the Giant of social media and the first one to surpass a billion users, but I was surprised at the information that I found out whilst writing this post. This was just meant to be a simple article that would show how simple Pinterest is to use and the results I was getting, but it turned out to be more than that, and a sure sign that I should do a little research more often.
User Numbers
Research and image from Statista.com
Thank you to Statista.com for their stats.
As you can see Facebook has in excess of 1.4 Billion users and Twitter a mere 2.8 Million, and way down in Twelth place, which is far lower than I thought they would be. LinkedIn were further up than I expected (don’t ask me why) in seventh place, but the shocker for me was that Pinterest was nowhere to be seen, and when I investigated I found out why.
The graph starts at 100 million and there are only 72 million pinning accounts, I say only, but that is low in comparison to the others, especially when there are others on the graphic above that I have not even heard of, crazy!
Social Choice
Have I been chasing the wrong dog, or what? I have a Facebook account and I do post on it fairly regular, but do not seem to get that much response, Twitter also gets a fair amount of attention, but again my response is not that great, so when I saw that Pinterest was bringing a decent response it prompted me to write this post and tell all.
But what if have been backing the wrong horse and not given the other platforms the attention they deserve, I could have lost out on a lot of traffic. The Giant is Facebook and out in front by a mile, so if nothing else, writing this post has got me thinking about how I can learn more about it and utilize it for its full potential.
I will not abandon Pinterest, and I will still look into Instagram as well as some other platforms, but it seems that I need to start dancing with the giant and get my share of the pie.
I hope this post has given you a little insight into the importance of research (it has me), and that you enjoyed the video, which was really just a bit of fun and a simple add on to this post. I would love to hear about your experiences with social media, and what platforms are working for you, so do leave your thoughts in the comments section below. To finish, Is Pinterest the Best? Probably not