The Top 4 Tools to Measure Your Pinterest Marketing Performance

Pinterest isn't just for pretty pictures... it's a fantastic reference site for any company, regardless of how visually appealing they may be (art, interior design) or not be (plumbing, timber production).

There’s no question that Pinterest has gained a lot of ground in the past few years. Earlier in 2012, Experian Hitwise reported that Pinterest was the third most popular social network in the United States. Pinterest reached 104 million members last year, and the numbers continue to grow.

With huge numbers like this, marketers have been scrambling to find ways to get their businesses in on the action.

We talk a lot about the other top social media sites and different tools that you can use to make posting to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn easier in our eBook “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn”.

If you’re  now looking for ways to really capitalize on Pinterest marketing, then here is our list of tools that you can start using today:

Measuring Your Pinterest Marketing “Pinfluence”

Social media presents a unique challenge in analyzing and measuring (though we give a ton of tips and tricks on how to use HubSpot’s social media analytics software in our free eBook “The Essential Guide For Mastering HubSpot”).

Pinpuff

The good news is that a great tool has been created where you can calculate your popularity or “pinfluence” on Pinterest called “Pinpuff”.  All you need to do to get started is to go to your website, type in your Pinterest username and your email address, and then click on the button, “Calculate your Pinfluence”.  You’ll then be met with a number of stats, like:

• Your number of followers
• The number of people following you
• Number of pins and repins
• Number of boards
• Number of likes and liked

In the upper right hand sidebar you’ll get your total score, though your score is then broken down into three separate sections:

• Activity Score
• Reach Score
• Virality Score

Pinreach

What we also found pretty cool about this tool was that it will measure the “value” of your pins and your referral traffic. Pinreach is another analytical tool that offers a lot of the same tools as Pinpuff, except it has some additional features that you can take advantage of.

As with Pinpuff, you can see information like the number of pins, repins, likes, liked, followers, comments, boards and so on, as soon as you log on. Unlike Pinpuff which gives you your scores, Pinreach offers a four-tab set up, with the first tab showing you a graph displaying all of the activity and changes that have occurred since you last logged into the site.

It also will give you a visual run down of what your best performing pins are, and who your most influential followers are (we see this as possibly being a great way to find people to pick out to nurture to become future brand loyalists).

Browser Extensions

Recent Activity Expander

There are a couple of browsers extensions that we really like that companies should take advantage of.  One of them is the “Recent Activity Expander”. Once installed, you’ll notice that an extra column will be added to the left-hand side of your personal Pinterest page.

In that column will be a list of all of the recent activity related to your account, such as who has repinned your pictures and followed you since you  last logged in. Marketers and business owners can quickly and easily see exactly what’s been happening since they’ve been gone without having to dig into their analytics software.

Pinterest Pro

Pinterest Pro is another great extension that’s Chrome-compatible.  This software brings three neat features to the table:

• Image zooming
• “Popular Pin Dropdown”
• “Pin to Pinterest”

With image zooming, you can quickly and easily enlarge every single image that's pinned without even having to click on the image – all you need to do is hover your mouse over that image and it will expand.

“Popular Pin Dropdown” will place a Pinterest icon in the upper right-hand corner of your Chrome browser. When you want to get on Pinterest, all you need to do is click on that button and you can immediately check out the freshest and most popular content on the site, all without having to even load the website.

When you choose the “Pin to Pinterest” option, you can easily “pin” a photo right to your Pinterest  board and quickly fill in all of the details about that image, all without having to log into the site.

This is a great feature for anyone who’s looking to save time, and who doesn’t want to get sucked into surfing the site for the next hour or two – especially important since we all know just how addictive Pinterest can be.