Study: How to make pins go viral

New metrics from Banner Peak Group's pinsights report may help. The platform analyzes how consumers engage and interact through the Pinterest site. According to the data:

• Pins from other-than a brand's website were 50% more likely to 'go viral
• Brands get the most play from 'consistently pinning' engaging content not just from people visiting the brand's pins
• Mavens - defined as brand pinning images outside their own websites get the most interest
• Connectors repin pins from other-than sources; Mavens gain more virality than Connectors
• Highest virality came to brands who have more repins (per 1,000 followers)

"Often when looking at distributions of internet data -- product sales, search query frequencies, etc -- we see highly skewed distributions in which 10% of the items can generate 90% of the results. That turned out not to be true in this case," writes the company. "We found that the top 1% of pins (ranked by virality) generate only 7% of repins, while the top 10% of pins generate less than 40% of repins. So for these brands, pinning is not really a 'hits' business."

Moral of the study: brands that pin interesting or engaging content, whether created by the brand or not, get more interest, more repins and more engagement than brands pinning only images/content from their own websites. Take a note, brands, and start looking at content across the board.

Tags: Banner Peak Group, pinterest, social engagement, social marketing, social media, social virality, viral marketing