3 Innovative Social Media Campaigns on Pinterest

By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Pinterest, (especially if you follow my blogs here!). Is it just hype? I’ll let you decide after showing you some of the recent Pinterest campaigns that caught my attention recently.

Inspiration Day – Kotex Women

Smoyz, an Israeli creative agency found a way to generate buzz on Pinterest. Recently, the company launched a campaign called “Inspiration Day” which involves finding 50 influential Israeli women on Pinterest. From there, they got them to repin items and sent some of the items that they pinned as gifts.

The result? According to the video, almost 100 percent of the recipients posted a photo of the prizes on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram which resulted in more than 2,000 interactions and 684,853 impressions. Quite impressive results when you realize that all this happened through a mere 50 boxes of gifts.

I would say that this is definitely an innovative campaign. However, as a marketer, I question the calculation of ‘total impressions’ and how the company got that number.

Note: Although the Israeli company claimed to have done the FIRST Pinterest social media campaign, they are definitely NOT the first as there are other social media campaigns on Pinterest before theirs.

Pinterest Lottery – British Midland International

BMI (British Midland International) launched what I think is the first lottery campaign on Pinterest. All users have to do is Pin up to six images from seven destinations on their Pinterest boards. All the photos are given a number from one to 63. Each week, BMI will choose a photo at random. If the number on the photo belongs to a user and gets ‘pinned,’ the users will win a free BMI flight to the selected destination. 

Go Red For Women – American Heart Association
Each year, the major cause of death for women is from heart disease. To put that numbe in perspective; the number of deaths caused by heart disease is more than death caused by any form of cancer combined. To raise awareness, the American Heart Association launched a ‘Go Red For Women’ campaign throughout all social media networks including Pinterest.

The campaign centers around the theme of the colour red. Users can share or pin anything that has the colour red such as red dresses, red photos, or anything red that catches their attention. An awareness campaign like this could be big in Pinterest as the campaign itself is easy to digest, yet it could still send a powerful message. This is an excellent example of how collective images with a theme in mind could bring out a powerful message.

So after hearing about these campaigns, what is the Pinterest takeaway?

Well to me, although this site is still in its early stages and has a long way to go, the popularity of the site and hype shouldn’t be ignored. These companies above are proof that sometimes ‘The Hype’ could be used as a business tool, and will help Pinterest to grow as well.

What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts on this.

This article was also published on iStrategy Conference blog where I contribute weekly. Check their blog for more social media related blog articles.