I sometimes feel I do too much critiquing and too little suggesting. Like, somehow, I’m the 400 pound, mullet-sporting guy on his 3rd beer at the baseball game yelling at the 2nd baseman to hustle. So, every once in a while on a Wednesday I’ll try to balance the scales a bit and put my own ideas up for display, analysis, and critique. (view all “WID” posts).

When Pinterest first came out, I took a pretty clear position on what I felt would be the best strategy for most resorts. My stance was this: don’t create an account but do give Pinterest users a frictionless way of pinning stuff from your site.

Honestly, that’s a way you could approach many of your social media initiatives, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, I want to revisit Pinterest a little over a year after that initial post.

A lot has changed.

Analytics Then
While a few analytics tools did pop up, the basic way to check on what content was being pinned from your website was to do a simple SOURCE search like this:
http://pinterest.com/source/vail.com/

The results were displayed in a typical pinboard layout which made it easy to skim, but hard to dig into specifics.

Analytics Now
A few weeks ago, Pinterest released their new web analytics platform. An analysis daily pins, repins, impressions, and clicks, the design was sharp and the data clear.

Source: Pinterest Blog

What I’d Do
I still think that for most resorts (and there are of course exceptions), Pinterest is still best utilized in a hands off fashion. Make it crazy easy to let people pin photos, videos, and graphics from your website, but don’t worry so much about setting up your own page.

If you do take that path, what I’d do is get analytics going for your resort’s domain. The basic setup there is:

1. Create an account if you don’t have one
2. Activate the “new look” from your account menu
3. Verify your resort’s website
4. Click on the “Analytics” link in your account settings

Then, set some goals, keep an eye on your stats, and let your web traffic do the pinning for you.

That’s what I’d do.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.