The Long Tail Of Pinterest Referral Links

Does Pinterest Traffic Have A Long Tail? “  

Yes!

Why Does That Matter? “

Keep reading, I’ll share 4 reasons smart marketers need to know this…

The referral traffic coming out of Pinterest to our ecommerce site, (www.libertyjanepatterns.com), is a long tail distribution curve.

Let’s geek out on this for a minute…

The Long Tail concept was made popular by Chris Anderson‘s [awesome] book, “The Long Tail“. You can still find the original, [ground-breaking], article from Wired Magazine: The Long Tail here.

To see our Pinterest traffic distribution curve I plotted our Pinterest referral traffic, (from the last month), using Google Analytics data. Over the last 30 days 1,193 visits came from 484 Pinterest Pins. Some of those were from our corporate Pinterest Profile, many were not. If you chart that in Excel, using a column chart, then it looks like this:

Now compare that to what the referral traffic from Facebook looks like for the same period. I received 1,125 visits from 4 referral links. Almost the same traffic, but from just 4 sources:

Maybe your boss will ask you tomorrow,

Why Are You So Excited About Pinterest?, (Get Back To Work On Facebook)… 

What will you say? “I like Pinterest more” ? “I feel like Pinterest is better” ? No…you’ve gotta have a reason man. Here it is…

4 Reasons A Pinterest Traffic Long Tail Distribution Curve Is Good For Your Business:

1. There is safety in numbers. I’d rather have traffic from the nearly 500 referral links in Pinterest than 4 referral links in Facebook. So as a marketer, I feel more comfortable, safe, and confident growing our Pinterest efforts than I do our Facebook efforts.
2. The Pinterest links aren’t all on our company’s Pinterest profile. They are distributed over many user profiles, [our raving fans]. That’s a good thing. Again, safety in numbers. For example,
3. If our company’s user profile got shut down by Pinterest, we would NOT be screwed. That’s awesome.
4. The opportunity for virality is enhanced if you have more potential sources/opportunities for social sharing. There are popular pins, and some go viral. And the odds of a Pin going viral are greater when there are simply more ‘in the market’. Again, this is awesome.

What do you make of this data? Is it similar on your website? Tell us what you think…

Finally, If you want to totally geek out impress your boss over distribution curves, the Long-Tail, Bimodal Distribution, and related concepts, watch this Khan Academy video.

Ps. Hey, don’t forget to…