Like a lot of big news, the $1Bn acquisition of Instagram by Facebook will be seen eventually as inevitable as it first seemed shocking. Yes, Facebook was “scared shitless” of what Instagram might become. (In the same way that Flickr should have been scared of Facebook in 2005 right before the former was bought by Yahoo for $35m.) It’s for the same reason that many are trying to make sense of Pinterest, now by some measures the third-biggest social network – driving more referral traffic than Google+, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and MySpace combined. And it’s one of the reasons for Facebook’s Timeline redesign and for Timeline’s huge success in improving engagement (up 176% by Adobe’s estimate).

Social media is now more about images and less about words. 

I think that these three phenomena – the incredible sticker price Facebook is paying for Instagram, the rise of Pinterest and Facebook’s Timeline – all make sense only if you agree that the web has steadily become more visual. And that has huge implications for how social practitioners will need to up their game.

This trend isn’t new. I would mark it as starting properly in November 2001, when Nokia introduced the first cameraphone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (I was there and reported on it for The Irish Times). One could argue that innovation was the tipping point that led to the final decline of Kodak. One could equally point to a number of other factors – such as how of newer-generation blogging platforms like Tumblr with a younger user base are focused on presenting visual content. Pro users of Facebook will know that when they post visual content and not just words, those posts have far higher levels of engagement. And if you want to get a lot of retweets on Twitter, post an Infographic. But with the events of recent weeks there can be little doubt that we’re in a significant moment. The rules are changing – again.

This increasingly visual social web poses challenges to marketers:

1. Visual Literacy: Knowing that images are going to cut through better than words alone doesn’t instantly make you good at it. There is a set of skills around image creation and/or curation that are more scarce than posting ‘how was your weekend?’ on your Facebook brand page.
2. Legal: Pinterest is a legal minefield. ‘Pinning’ copyrighted images is the norm, despite the site’s Terms of Use. Knowing how to act as a brand when you now need more visual content is going to be a field ripe for conflict. How many company social media policies both cover the company legally and don’t stifle use of visuals?
3. Social Analytics: In 10 years of trying, market leaders in social media monitoring have still not fully cracked how to automate judgements around the sentiment behind words posted online. As visual content becomes more important, how will analytics understand how a brand and its consumers are communicating online?

How will brands and social marketers respond?

We are already seeing some interesting examples of campaigns and initiatives that are more visually-led.

Harrods recently launched a fascinating competition to create a mood board on Pinterest to help design the famous retailer’s shop window to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. UK consumers who pin an image to Harrod’s Pinterest board for inspiration for Diamond Jubilee Street Parties will have a chance to get their own ideas made real in the famous shop window and be brought to London for the unveiling.

And when we recently set up the Celtic Tiger Museum as a little project – capturing the memories of a lot of people who lived through Ireland’s boom years – it caught imaginations of thousands of people in Ireland and around the world and also world media, with the BBC, CBC and RTE all covering the website. Because the idea was quite simple and visual – to (ideally) submit a photo of an object that symbolised Ireland’s years of excess – it was personal, powerful and emotional.

If you haven’t given any thought to how your brand is going to adapt to the new, visual rules of engagement – it’s time to start. Your competitors will soon. Your customers started quite a while ago.

The reason for the attention and a need to understand Pinterest is easy to understand. The site refers more traffic to brand websites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn – combined. And brands are already embracing it, using Pinterest for everything from competitions, crowdsourcing and showcasing product.

And talking to friends in the media planning business with control over massive traditional and digital ad budgets, the topic of Pinterest moves from one of intellectual curiosity or something to experiment with to one of serious questions about where to place big bets. Knowing that a site is – as the conventional wisdom goes – 98% female, bursting with brides-to-be, people who wish they were brides to be and people who knit their own cats (or something) – is hugely valuable information in targeting that audience.

Which is where the misconception gets most dangerous. Because it is a misconception. The ‘Pinterest is 98% female’ line originates with a look at the composition of ‘Likes’ of Pinterest on Facebook, as reported by TechCrunch.

But – particularly here in the UK – the picture is very different.

According to data from Google’s AdPlanner tool – as detailed in the lovely infographic to the right – in the UK the Pinterest audience is majority male, has its highest proportion in the top income bracket and has ‘venture capital’ as the number one area of interest. Since the infographic’s data from December, the site has gotten MORE male (56% in December, 57% as of data pulled on 29 February). It’s also grown from 200,000 unique visitors per month to 320,000 per month in the UK. (In the US, uniques have grown from 12m to 19m.)

It’s also worth noting that Pinterest in the US isn’t as female as the ’98%’ meme – 83% in the data from December; and down 1 point to 82% as of this morning’s data.

While the numbers will undoubtedly change, it’s worth noting that the received wisdom, endlessly RT’d – is always worth checking.

We’re already working with some projects using Pinterest. Are you?

Pinterest UK audience data is revealing