Pinterest's Relevance to Healthcare

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Pinterest’s Relevance to Healthcare

July 10, 2012 by dandunlop

In February 2012 I wrote a post about “Pinterest for Healthcare Marketers.” At the time, my head was spinning with the thought of yet another social media platform that was too hot to ignore! I’m not one to recommend that marketers jump on the latest social media bandwagon (but I am one to explore the latest phenomenon). My philosophy has always been that if your hospital adopts a particular social media platform, it should be because that platform allows you to engage a specific target audience that is important to your organization’s mission or business objectives; and you should only do it if you have the resources needed to do it well. In other words, don’t spread your limited resources out across so many vehicles that you lose your ability to do any of it effectively.

Back to Pinterest. In my prior post I simply wanted to help remove some of the mystery that surrounded Pinterest and begin a conversation. I had just joined Pinterest, and set up three pinboards: 1) Healthcare Marketing; 2) Books Worth Reading; and 3) Blogs I Recommend. Each has a healthcare marketing bent. At the time, I was in the experimentation phase of my relationship with Pinterest. (post continues below)

It has been a few months and I’d like to share with you my perspective on how my experiment with Pinterest has gone. Is it relevant to health? After several months of experimentation, I have to say that it is highly relevant. I’ll use my personal experience as a case in point. Since starting my first three pinboards, Pinterest has become the second largest referral source of traffic to my healthcare marketing blog. Yesterday Pinterest referred 69 visitors to my blog. I know I’m not a hospital, but readers of my blog tend to be marketers who work for hospitals, health systems, physician practices and people interested in health and wellness. Last week, Pinterest accounted for 12.3% of the traffic to my blog. Google was the only source to top that, accounting for 31.8% of the traffic. As I look back over the last quarter, Pinterest is still the second leading referrer of traffic to my blog, just slightly edging out Twitter (Google remains in first place). So how did this happen? Essentially people interested in health, wellness and healthcare marketing have been visiting my pinboards and repinning items, adding them to their own pinboards. As people continue to find these items, long after they’ve left my site through repinning, they still provide the original link back to the source: and sometimes that source is my blog. Of course, another thing that happens is that readers of the blog pin items that they find of interest, and these pins then lead people to my healthcare marketing blog. Below are a few examples of pins created from readers of my blog (there are literally dozens of them):

If you’re interested in learning more about the potential that Pinterest holds for healthcare marketers and communicators, check out the following articles: