Facebook’s advertising team must be gnashing their teeth at a soon-to-be-launched Dial campaign. Next week will debut the Move the Dial Pinterest contest, in which Dial Facebook fans will be urged to create a board on Pinterest with pinned images that show how their favorite cause helps “move the dial” in their community. The winning charity will receive a $5,000 donation.
Pinterest, I can hear the Facebook team exclaiming, through clenched teeth, is not supposed to be about relationship building or branding. It is about the image and the categories in which these images fall.
As Tom Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy at themarketingarm says: “Visual images transcend language, evokes emotion and means something unique to each individual. So when you combine visual images + discoverability of content amplified by social relevance to the user, you get a powerful tool.”
This is why Pinterest traffic tends to convert at e-commerce sites into sales at higher rates than Facebook traffic does–people are naturally in the mood to buy after looking at the pictures, whereas they may or may not be after checking their Facebook feed for the thousandth time, then playing a game, watching a video, and so on, on Facebook.
Recent statistics have been particularly grim for Facebook, which among other goals wants to build up its social commerce bona fides. A joint research project by Shop.org, comScore and The Partnering Group, found that online U.S. consumers follow an average of 9.3 retail companies on Pinterest, compared to the average 6.9 retailers on Facebook and the 8.5 retailers on Twitter. Another study, from SteelHouse, reports that Pinterest users 79% more likely to purchase something they saw on the site compared to Facebook.
It’s not that Facebook isn’t moving in this direction Edwards says—it is. “The shift within timeline to drive visual storytelling is a first step towards driving engagement visually,” he says. “The differences when it comes to Pinterest vs. Facebook influencing e-commerce, Facebook users traditionally spend less but are more engaged with the brand as a whole, while data shows Pinterest has a higher ability to influence a single transaction but less overall time spent on a retailers site.”
This in-and-out, no-engagement-necessary mode of e-commerce, I must say, is particularly appealing – and not just to me.
In their wonderful piece in the Harvard Business Review, “Three Myths about What Customers Want,”  Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird, took on the notion that consumers want to have a relationship with a brand. No, in fact, most do not.
They do not want to be bombarded with surveys and contests and endless emails about upcoming new product offerings, unless that is, it is a discount or coupon of some kind. And in that case, just leave the offer in the inbox please, and then leave.
This lack of ever-determined, ever-cheerful engagement with the customer is the secret behind Pinterest’s rave success – and the reason why Facebook has yet to successfully morph its site into a social commerce platform.
“On Pinterest, no real conversations are taking place and it has evolved as a place to trigger purchases than Facebook,” N. Venkat Venkatraman, a business professor at Boston University, pointed out to me recently. Meanwhile, Facebook is the top social community, but the premise that social advertising leads to commerce is still unproven, he says.
The irony, he says, is that “photographs of products pinned and liked and shared can be more readily connected with offers from companies than text conversations on Facebook.”
So why is Dial using a Facebook strategy to get traction on Facebook? Old habits probably—engagement works on Facebook, so why not try it on Pinterest? And who knows, it could well work for Dial. To see my favorite cause $5,000 richer I’ll take the time to compile a board. But is the campaign good for Pinterest, at least in the long term? Too many calls for engagement, too much commercialism could put the site, in the eyes of its users, in the same bucket as all the other social media sites—another Facebook wannabe. Which actually is probably where Facebook would like to see Pinterest go. So maybe they are happy about the Dial campaign after all.
