With that kind of a title, I bet I have your attention now.
It is true that I have been praising Google+ for about a month leading up to their 100 millionth account. In fact, I was as bold as to claim that they will eventually become the gold standard in social media.
I take none of that back.
But Pinterest is currently doing something that Google+ is not. Pinterest is bringing in a lot of traffic.
This revelation first came out from my own personal blog. I subscribe to the idea of only investing in three social media networks at a time. For the first two months, I had put all my eggs in the Google+ basket believing that this was the time for them to shine. It was not.
So in March, I decided to stop with our Google+ account and go all in on Pinterest for the same two months to see how it would do. Amazingly, in the first two weeks of use, we have seen ten times the traffic referrals from Pinterest that Google+ brought in over two months. Statistically, that means that that Pinterest has done 4,000% better than Google+.
Of course that was a small scale test. Yet, Sharaholic.com has seen similar results on websites they monitor:
The question comes down to why?
People scan written content, but their interest is not necessarily peaked by it. Not similarly, Pinterest’s image driven network does peak curiousity from people and they want to see what people have to say that accompanies the image they have posted.
It really is a blogging 101 idea. Your articles should not only be well written, but all visual media needs to be entertaining and eye-catching. Pinterest simply amplifies this.
We are still holding out for Google+ and think that Google will eventually be the standard, but for the time being Pinterest has differentiated themselves enough to gain popularity online.
What do you think: Is Pinterest “better” than Google+?
Mickey says
I agree with that, and I’m seeing similar numbers, but there’s one big difference — Google+ makes a huge impact on search results. If I search for almost anything, the results are heavily skewed by people that I follow on Google+. If I click one of those results, it shows up as an organic Google search (which it was), but Google+ made all of the difference.
That’s the challenge — is Google+ really driving traffic to my site? I tend to think so, but it’s nearly impossible to measure the impact that it’s having on the search results…
Jeremy Smith says
Agreed that the G+ results are schewed, but only if the person is logged into their account and has a G+ account. So for now, until users are more engaged, the advantage is still Pinterest.
Mickey says
While being logged in certainly does more to skew the results, even a non logged-in user has their results affected. Try searching for “music” while not logged in and you’ll see “xxxx people +1’d this” on various results, and “people and pages on google+” over on the right.
Certainly nothing against Pinterest though, as it’s driving huge traffic to some of my clients.