Dabbling in Pinterest as an Early Adopter in Pro Sports

If you go to enough social media marketing conferences, you’ll start to hear the same anecdotes and see the same presentations multiple times. I’ve seen the legendary Old Spice viral campaign get name-checked by a dozen lazy, platitude-spitting speakers who probably drew up their PowerPoint on the plane the night before.

But at the recent Social Commerce Strategies show in Las Vegas last month, something new came up, and it came up more than once. Everyone was talking about something called Pinterest.

Celtics on Pinterest

Pinterest is the hottest new social networking site, and its user base skews as high as 97 percent female. The Boston Celtics are among a few early adopters in the professional sports industry.

I’d heard about the social media platform a few times before the conference, but in the course of two days in Vegas, I heard the word “Pinterest” more than I heard “Changing $500!”. So it became obvious that I needed to know more about Pinterest, aside from the basic idea that it was a social network dominated by women.

Given that the online fan base of the Boston Celtics, and presumably that of most professional sports teams, is about 75% male, Pinterest peaked my interest. Perhaps it’s a way to reach an underserved demographic? Pinterest’s user base is overwhelmingly dominated by women; it’s reportedly 97 percent female.

Upon my return to Boston, I launched a Pinterest page for the Celtics. Within an a few hours of pinning items like Celtics merchandise, players, Celtics Dancers and ticket packages, we’d picked up about 100 followers. After a Facebook and Twitter post later in the day, we were somewhere around 300 followers.

I posted another notice to our six million Facebook followers on Presidents Day, when many Americans probably spent their holiday planted in front of their home computers, and we doubled our audience within minutes.

As of this writing, we have over 650 followers. What does it all mean? It’s too early to tell now, but I tried to explain what we know about it so far to SportsDigita last week when they noticed the Celtics are among the few pro sports teams dabbling with the platform.

One Comment Add yours

  1. Surprised I missed this post, did discuss the Celtics on ABC Grandstand (http://sportsgeek.com.au/social-media/social-media-for-good-sports-on-pinterest-from-abcgrandstand/).

    How did the Pin It to Win it promo go?

    From our investigations people are more likely to follow boards than people, it would be good if they allowed you to see who was following a board rather than just finding out via notifications (which seem to be buggy). Celtics get a good run on our Sports on Pinterest board – pinterest.com/seancallanan/sports-on-pinterest/

    Good luck in the playoffs mate.

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