Why Marketers Will Have A Pinerly Pinterest Strategy in 2013

It is always fun to see the offshoots of popular social media sites. TweetDeck, HootSuite and Radian 6 could never have existed without sites as popular as Facebook and Twitter.

Well, there is a new third-party tool in town called Pinerly. And while it is still in invite-only/beta mode, many are speculating that marketers will have a Pinerly Pinterest strategy in 2013.

What Is Pinerly?

Pinerly allows you to create a campaign and post it to Pinterest. It then delivers data such as click-throughs, likes and repins.

For those of you who have run a Pinterest contest or engaged in Pinterest marketing you know that gathering this information manually is more than a chore. Pinerly allows you to aggregate all of this valuable data in one place. It is similar to Owl.ly tracking in Hootsuite in this way.

But the goals of Pinerly do not stop there. The company specifically states that “Our goal for Pinerly is to continue building the most comprehensive tools to help you optimize your marketing strategy for social media sites.” Based on this, we can speculate that they may be creating solutions outside of Pinterest in the future.

Creating A Campaign In Pinerly

When you create a campaign in Pinerly, you are essentially just pinning something. However, since you are doing it through the Pinerly interface you can track stats. Like Pinterest, you can either add a Pin via a URL or through a file upload.

For the purposes of this column, let’s select the website option and Pin SEO Inc. (Full disclosure: this is my employer.) After choosing your link, you can select where you want to pin it, add a description and image, and then Pinerly it.

Additionally, you can spice up your photos by adding effects.

You can also turn on or off, something called the Shorten and Track option. If you turn this option off, you can only track links and repins, but not the number of clicks. The benefit is that it keeps the original URL intact.

Once you have set up your pin, it is just a matter of looking at the Pinalytics, which, of course, is Pinerly’s term for analytics. When I was going through this process, I ran into a few errors. Keep in mind the site is still in invite-only beta mode.

Pinalytics

Here is a look at the Pinalytics tab. As you can see, we have items like date range, best-performing boards and you can even filter by account in case you are managing multiple clients. The metrics in Pinalytics include campaigns, clicks, likes, repins and reach.

Summing Up Pinerly

Pinerly is a great new tool that online marketers should consider utilizing when running Pinterest campaigns.

Pinterest campaigns are still very new and many companies are running these campaigns in the dark, often relying on poor metrics and even breaking online contest laws. Pinerly provides a little more insight into what is really going on when these campaigns run.

So give it a shot if you can get an invite!