While agents using Pinterest to promote niche travel
opportunities have had positive results from the social media platform,
particularly in destination weddings and honeymoons, it is not as widely used
as other channels despite its inherent visual nature, which would seemingly
lend itself perfectly to travel.
"You don't see a lot of agents using Pinterest that
much," said Margie Jordan, vice president of membership services for CCRA
and a widely respected expert on using social media to market travel products
and services.
She said the somewhat stunted adoption of Pinterest in the
agent community could be due to a variety of factors.
"I feel like there's a little bit of a break in agents'
knowledge in how to use Pinterest and what it's really best for," Jordan
said.
Margie Jordan
For example, she said, agents could be pinning things that
don't link back to their website and instead link to a supplier's pin, which
doesn't garner them any web traffic or potential leads.
The amount of effort it takes to use Pinterest could also
have something to do with its lagging behind more popular platforms such as
Facebook, according to Brian Hegarty, vice president of marketing for Travel
Leaders Group.
"It's definitely not within the top two or three that
most agents are participating in when it comes to social channels," he
said of Pinterest. "I think part of that is because of the effort that it
takes to be [on Pinterest]. It's something that you have to continuously post
new pictures to and create albums and opportunities and promote for there to be
value versus in other channels."
Hegarty also theorized that travel advisers are using the
social platforms with which they're most comfortable on a personal level, and
Pinterest might not be one of those.
He recommends that agents choose to specialize in only one
or two social media channels and do really well, and by that standard,
Pinterest is usually not in an agent's top two platforms.
Rosemarie Reed, vice president of sales and marketing for
World Travel Holdings, said she tends to steer agents away from using
Pinterest, instead urging them to spend their time on platforms that they use
already and with which they are comfortable.
"I personally believe Pinterest did not originally
embrace business accounts/profiles," Reed said, and how brands and
individuals could be differentiated on the social media platform. "This
led to low adoption early on for brands/businesses."
While she said Pinterest has evolved and added useful
business capabilities since it was first developed, it doesn't make the list of
the top channels for agents.
Even so, Pinterest has found its place within the agency
community. Travel advisers with niche specialties, such as destination
weddings, honeymoons or family travel, have achieved success on the site.
Catherine Heeg, founder of Customized Management Solutions
and a frequent industry speaker on social media marketing, said Pinterest lends
itself to agents who have specialties ranging from weddings to garden and
culinary tours.
"Anything that's a real focus specialty where you can
really understand your audience and put out things that are related to that
niche but also have some other aspects to it," makes acceptable Pinterest
content, she said. As an example, she cited a wedding Pinterest board that
features honeymoon-related pins as well as pins with ideas for invitations,
bridal party gifts and things of that nature.
Hegarty said that "more aspirational travel categories,"
like honeymoons, family travel and safaris, do well on Pinterest because of
their visual nature and the fact that many Pinterest users visit the site to
collect things they want to do in the future.
Agents interested in starting Pinterest boards are advised
to drive their Pinterest traffic back to their website, blog or other online
assets that they control. If they see success through increased traffic to
those assets, Jordan said, they should consider using Pinterest's targeted
marketing to boost their pins.
"One of the biggest benefits of Pinterest is how much
traffic it actually drives to your website," she said. "Because that
pin, for however long it's repinned and lasts on Pinterest, it doesn't ever go
away. The link to your website can never be taken away. ... It's a huge driver
of traffic to websites."