The False Promise of Pinterest for Financial Services

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A year or so ago, as Pinterest started to garner media attention and a mass audience, a host of agencies and consultants that focus on the financial services industry launched a wave of blog posts and presentation decks to champion the power of this new image-sharing platform for banks, insurance firms, credit card companies and credit unions. A year or so later, those optimistic predictions have been largely unrealized. While Pinterest is proving successful for retail, home goods, media, style and other categories, it is not proving to be the "next big thing" for financial services.

Clearly, Pinterest has had a great 2012--Nielsen tells us that traffic to Pinterest has increased over 1,000% this year--but traffic and demographics alone do not make a social network useful for business. Marketers must consider consumer behaviors and expectations on the platform. The failure to do so undermined many of the concepts bloggers were so eager to promote to financial services brands. For example, many suggested a bank could start a "wish list" board for photos of items people can save for, and another common idea was to start Pinterest boards that match customers' interests, such as golf or travel. The uselessness of these ideas is obvious to anyone who has spent a few minutes on Pinterest--people share photos of the things they cannot afford and the places they want to travel without any assistance from their financial services providers. Consumers simply do not need their bank or insurance company to help them do on Pinterest what Pinterest exists for in the first place!

Financial services firms have done an outstanding effort of testing the new platform but seen very little by way of evident results. This is not a criticism of Pinterest--no single social network or tool needs to (or should) fit every brand and industry--but perhaps this is a criticism of a marketing machine that pushes every new thing, regardless of the sense or strategy. Now that we can look at 2012 in the rear view mirror, it is easy to see there are few, if any, case studies that demonstrate Pinterest is a match for the goals of financial services brands.

If you know of great case studies I have missed, please share, but my recent survey of bank, credit card and insurance brands on Pinterest came up very dry:

Citi Jobs for Recruiting:  Recruiting is considered a potential use case for Pinterest, but it is not evident how photos and videos of people in conference rooms and cubicles really help. Citi had eight boards dedicated to their efforts in the community and careers, but it had only 32 followers and, interestingly, from the time I researched this blog post to the time I published it, the Citi Jobs Pinterest board has disappeared. Did Citi find the board was more costly to maintain and monitor than it was worth for the results?

Source: americanexpress.com
via American on Pinterest

American Express for Brand:  AmEx is a true social media leader in the financial services industry. It has blazed trails on Facebook, where the brand has earned 2.7 million likes and has more than 100,000 monthly active users of its Amex Sync Facebook app. If I had to guess the financial services brand that would make Pinterest work, it would be AmEx, but it has a mere 313 followers and a single like. Even terrific visual content such as this infographic on the importance of small business to our economy has earned just three repins and one like. The same image posted to the American Express OPEN Facebook page garnered 75 likes and 22 shares. In a sign of just how bad Pinterest engagement is for this interesting content, American Express had more success posting the infographic to Google+, where this same image earned one share and eight +1s.

PerkStreet Financial for Driving Traffic:  PerkStreet has been experimenting with various Pinterest strategies and has shared its middling results in an interesting deck posted to SlideShare. The brand attempted contests and found them difficult to run, although they did generate interest on Pinterest. (Whether interest in Pinterest pins equates into business is another question altogether, of course.) The company also attempted collaboration boards--encouraging people to post "stuff I didn't buy"--and found it was difficult to get participation. In the end, it seems the most successful thing PerkStreet did with Pinterest was to post more images to its blog and allow easy pinning to Pinterest boards; Pinterest became the fifth highest driver of traffic to its site. Despite these efforts, their board only has 304 followers.

USAA for Brand: At my former employer, we began experimenting with Pinterest in the past year. Given the community served by the organization, the goal on Pinterest was to share evocative images that conveyed the spirit and commitment of the military. Despite posting excellent shots into boards such as the U.S. Coast Guard Birthday and U.S. Army Birthday, the account only has 407 followers. Few of USAA's 155 pins have been repinned more than a handful of times, and almost none has earned more than a couple of likes. Compare this to one recent photo that USAA posted to its Facebook page of a child greeting his mother returning from deployment --12,702 likes, 2,318 shares and 178 comments. I am pleased to see USAA continue to experiment, but it is evident the association gets far more bang for its buck on Facebook than on Pinterest.

Capital One for Promotion: Cap One offers a Pinterest Board focused on its Venture rewards program. It has almost twice as many pins as it has followers--406 pins, 217 followers and 38 likes. Just five percent of these pins have had any repins. It is not possible to tell if these images are proving successful at driving traffic to the Cap One site or interest in Cap One services, but there is no reason to think this is providing any benefits of significant scale.

At best, Pinterest seems an adjunct to the other visual marketing programs that financial services brands are already running rather than the hub of these sorts of programs. Given the modest results to date, the best thing brands in financial services can do is to be sure to implement sharing mechanisms on their sites so that consumers who care to share on Pinterest can easily do so.

Of course, one of the biggest challenges to financial services firms on Pinterest is not the lack of results but the need to manage Pinterest programs in a compliant fashion. Whereas platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are more mature and have APIs that permit the management and archiving through Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) such as Socialware, Sprinklr and Buddy Media, Pinterest still lacks such an API. That creates challenges for financial services firms who are required to archive, monitor and moderate based on the regulations from FINRA, SEC and others.

Pinterest may eventually come of age in the financial services space, but it is difficult for me to see how its core purpose and interactivity will benefit financial services brands in any way with significant scope.  I'd welcome your input if you disagree or can offer good examples of financial services brands succeeding on Pinterest.