The stats on the growth of Pinterest are everywhere. And as it was reported in Forbes, it's now the third largest social network, behind Facebook and Twitter. You can see from this image that people spend as much or more time on the site as they do just about everywhere else (other than Facebook).
So if that's the case, why haven't I downloaded this great plugin that puts a ‘pin it' shortcut on every image of my blog? Here are three reasons why I'm ignoring the pin it on pinterest WordPress plugin.
1. My audience isn't yet very active on Pinterest (yet)
From the research I've seen, the majority of Pinterest users are women between 25 and 35. Now, clearly, that's going to change as it continues to grow. But according to both my comment section and SproutSocial – almost 65% of my audience is male (and I'm guessing they're pushing out past 35). Now I'm not saying this blog will ignore Pinterest forever, but as I keep an eye on my audience, I'll know when it makes sense.
2. It isn't aligned with the Action I want
If I were creating recipes or posters, clearly what I would want is for people to post and repost my images of food or my posters all over Pinterest. In that case, the action they take and the action I want are aligned. That said, while my images for my articles are often nice to look at (at least I think so), having people pass them around online has absolutely nothing to do with the point of my site. As I've mentioned before, my blog plays mostly a support role to the work I do in real life helping people with new product development, WordPress site or application development, or presentations. So until the alignment makes sense, I don't plan to put ‘pin it' links everywhere.
3. I like a Focused-workflow
It's the topic of another article, but today as I author a post, it gets automatically queued up for replication to either another site, or at minimum to Facebook and/or Twitter without having to do anything. Getting the right image selected from a post and pushed out to Pinterest in an automated fashion isn't there yet, in a way I want or like. So until then, I'm taking a pass. I rather focus on what I know and can monitor effectively and go from there.
That said, there are some things I do post on Pinterest…
You might get the sense that I don't like Pinterest and nothing could be further from the truth. I like it just fine – for what it does well. So you'll notice that when I create an infographic, like the one I did for WordPress hosting or for Sticky Teaching, I made sure to get those images on Pinterest. But that's different than getting every image on my site integrated to their social network.