News Media and Pinterest: An Impossible Match ?

News media are aware that their presence on social media is essential in the web sphere, but some of them have difficulties to adapt their content to the platform they have chosen. Pinterest is a very good example of social media that cause a problem to news media in terms of content. Let’s see why.

One year and a half ago, The Economist, the famous English weekly newspaper, decided to ditch its Pinterest account. Indeed, Denise Law, community editor of the magazine declared for Digiday that “from day one, it was a struggle. [They] found it difficult to articulate what our raison d’être for Pinterest was. It’s not the place to share serious content; it’s more where people go to share ideas”. During six months, the group posted different content via their account, which still exists, and published pieces from its culture and lifestyle magazine called 1843, Intelligent Life. It broadcasted also articles from travel blog or pieces from its archives but the engagement was very low as it gathers only 5,000 followers. Then, let’s analyse why Pinterest is not considered by news media as a good social media to give information.

Fisrt of all, let’s have a look at the specificities of Pinterest. On September 2017, the social media counted 200 millions users according to e-marketing. Then, it is a social media that really can help media to reach a new audience. It has been created in 2010 and aims to share photographies and ideas. According to Adrien Boyer, Country Manager France of Pinterest, “the aim of Pinterest is not, contrary to other social media, to share projects from the past, but find inspirations for projects in the future”. The users can pin on their walls pictures founded on internet and gather them by themes or table. The categories that generate the most important traffic are the cook, mode, decoration, beauty and travel. Moreover, a huge part of the users are women, who represents 85% and 30% of them are aged between 25 and 34 years old according to Hootsuite. Then, those are all the elements that a news media have to take in consideration to develop a good strategy.

Then, with all the elements exposed before, we can define what type of post news media have to create to be successfull on Pinterest. News media can publish beautiful pictures that is directly linked to an article on line, but media have to pay attention to the theme of the article. It has to correspond to the spirit of Pinterest. That is why political or economical pictures will be probably less viwed than pictures related to article about lifestyle or travel for example. The problem met by The Economist is that their editorial line doesn’t match with the spirit of Pinterest. But does it means that Pinterest willnever match with any news media group?

Definitiley not. As we said before, Pinterest organized its content according to different themes. This represents a good opportunity for specialized magazine to promote their content. Some magazines have a target that latch with the main profile of users of Pinterest and propose a content which correponds to the main themes that brings the biggest traffic. For instance, Marie-Claire gathers around 171 thousands of followers on its account. The group pays attention to divide, the most as possible, its content in different categories and succeeded to adapt its content to the platform. It has 36 diffents tables that allows users to see the exact content that interest him.

But not only women’s magazine can succeed to adapt their content to the platform. Indeed, Pinterest has the advantage to rejuvenate some media and to reach a new audience. It appaers as a social media definitely young and can participate to modify the identity of a media. Moreover, some news media uses Pinterest to highlight their brand extension as the French newspaper L’Express did with L’Express Styles. The account gathers 2 thousands followers, which is not so bad compared to other traditional French media.

Moreover, infographies are really successful on this social media as it allows to have directly informations without clicking to the link attached to the pictures. This tendance can be exploited by the media, even the serious one which already use those type of pictures to explain serious and difficult topics. Then, if media develop a proper strategy to adapt their content to the social media, they probably can reach a success on this platform.

Finally, if you are a part of a news media and you want to use Pinterest to promote your content, let’s look at some rules taht you have to folllow before goin into posting a picture. Pay attention to use a picture very colorful and with a very good quality in order to catch the attention. The light is also important because to be catchy, a picture has to have a saturation of 50% and has to be in a portrait format. So, now, all you have to do is try it!