Pinterest as a place for sharing pictures, yes. But for Market Research? Well, yes.
If you don’t know Pinterest, it’s the hugely popular site that calls itself the online pinboard. It’s online social photo-sharing platform. Kaila Strong on Search Engine Watch astutely finds a number of ways to use it for market research.
Calling market research social listening, a term I like very much, she says that knowing the kinds of images your customers like is helpful when developing products and putting together a marketing strategy.
She looks into four areas where Pinterest can help you start your market research, following the direction of how Pinterest is set up. The site organizes “pins” into categories so a market researcher can look and see the most popular pins, the fonts that people like best, search in areas on the site where they want to launch their next product and see the latest, most popular pins in that area.
There is also a gift section, where you can browse through what others (the competition) are doing. You can also see what terms people use to describe items on your current site. And finally you can scan the user boards to understand how your customers like to organize their information, using that insight to organize the navigation on your site.
Lots of companies are still struggling with how to incorporate social networking into their sales and marketing strategies. But it is clear that companies can learn a lot about how their customers act based on their use of these sites. Pinterest for Market Research, pin that on your wall.
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