Searchmetrics has released 2 studies on US and UK newspapers use of Pinterest the Social Media bookmarking and content sharing site with a growing engaged audience and very desirable demographic for marketers.
Marcus Tober, founder and CTO of Searchmetrics, which collects data including an analysis of links shared on Pinterest and other social networks as part of its search social analytics software explained:
"Pinterest has the power to put publishers' content in front of new people and drive traffic back to their sites. While it's relatively new, Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social sites - increasing its share of all visits to social sites in the UK by 1489 per cent since last year1. The site has over 10 million registered users2 and in the USA high profile news sites such as the WSJ and New York and LA Times are among those that are successfully using it."
The studies show that neither US nor UK newspapers have made good use of Pinterest even though most of the US sites show interest in older bookmarking sites like delicious, newsvine, stumbleupon and reddit. 7 of the 26 Publishers had no Pinterest Page and only 1 used the Pinterest button with 6 having it in a generic share button often with the Pinterest option buried deep within a long dropdown list.
The UK study discovered links to Web pages from the Dailymail.co.uk were found to have been shared or 'pinned' by Pinterest users most (1,963,999 times), with the Telegraph.co.uk attracting 429,13 shares (called pins) to come second. The Guardian.co.uk takes third place with a total of 329,720 pins of its pages.
The US study found the NY Times was first with 537,850 pins and the LA times came in with 324,848 for second place. The Wall street Journal rounded out the top 3 sites with 262,262 pins identified in the research by search and social analytics company, Searchmetrics.
Searchmetrics also looked at pins/week as a metric finding that in the UK Dailymail.co.uk generates the most average Pins per week (163,574 ) followed by Telegraph.co.uk (42,476 ) and Guardian.co.uk (32,174 ) in the UK. In the US the NY Times led the way with 45,739 pins and the LA Times was second with 28,567 pins. The third place finisher was the Wall Street Journal with 25,140 pins.
Comparing the averages of the two regions indicates that pinning is more viral in the US whereas the UK seems to either have a more engaged audience and/or quality content indicated by Dailymail.co.uk average being 3X higher and having nearly as many followers as newspapers in the US despite servicing a much smaller population. This is another stat that supports the bookmarking hypothesis that has been recently circulating in the Pinterest marketing community.
Data in the UK study indicate the UK sites are doing well in comparison to its US counterparts with the Dailymail.co.UK leading the way with a weekly average of 163,574. The 3rd place Guardian has a higher average than the 2nd and 3rd in the US and the Telegraph is just behind the NY Times with the highest avg weekly total in the US.
The disparity in population between the US and UK sites should result in far fewer pins for UK sites but it is possible that the quality of the content drives more bookmarks in this limited study.
Source:
http://computernewsarticles.com/computer_articles/2012/10/searchmetrics-us-and-uk-studies-find-newspapers-missing-the-boat-on-pinterest-traffic-310814.htm
