Thomas Edison once said that he didn’t fail he just figured out a bunch of ways that didn’t work. That’s sort of like us with Pinterest. We tried. We failed figured out a bunch of ways that didn’t work.
We began our quest to determine if Pinterest would be effective for our business several weeks ago. We had been receiving emails about Pinterest from marketers almost daily. It seemed like everytime we looked in our inbox there was another White Paper or ebook about Pinterest to download. Pinterest, these materials proclaimed, is the summit of social media marketing. We love Hubspot and they continually pimped Pinterest. We were on board!
We created pinboards, pinned stuff, linked to things and commented on other people’s stuff. We found great images all over the Internet and pinned them our boards. We pinned our ebooks and White Papers. We even pinned videos and funny things. We were pinning fools.
Here’s the problem: it didn’t work.
Why We Failed Figured Out a Bunch of Ways to Do Pinterest Wrong
When we began our outreach on Twitter, LinkedIn (especially), Facebook and Google+, the results were immediate. We saw traffic, leads and interaction immediately. We expected the same thing with the vaunted new kid on the block, Pinterest. We were disappointed. Weeks went by without much traffic at all and our Pinteresty zeal was greatly diminished. Our Pinteresting activity followed suit. We stopped posting new things. We stopped pinning things. Our Pinteresting screeched to an unceremonious halt.
To be honest, it is a matter of resources (time). There are only so many warm bodies at a tech startup and those bodies simply couldn’t spend time on an outlet that was producing nothing. There are bigger fish to fry, more fish in the sea and outlets that are like shooting fish in a barrel (that’s weird that there are so many analogies about fish). Anyway, we simply couldn’t justify spending time on Pinterest when LinkedIn is producing 40 leads a week and when Twitter is producing a lot of traffic.
Are these justifications of a failed experiment? Perhaps.
So, we may return to Pinterest in the future. But, for now, Pinterest will be like that old shirt hanging in your closet that you know you should wear because you haven’t worn it in a while, but you don’t because it just doesn’t ‘work’ for you.
Or, maybe we should ‘man up’ and heed the words of Winston Churchill when he said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Wasn’t he talking about Pinterest?