Using Pinterest to Reach a Multilingual Travel & Hospitality Audience

June 13, 2012 Posted by Kathleen Bostick

Let’s talk about Pinterest for a moment. But where to begin?

I could write an unnecessary overview of what it is (unnecessary because this has been done by many others, please see below for a brief list of great articles), or I could compile some amazing statistics about how it’s growing (ditto, below). I could also, just for fun, create a trending graph that illustrates the number of blog posts written about Pinterest, with this being only the latest of what seems like, I don’t know… thousands per second! Just kidding, I wouldn’t do that.

I could, however, spend a few minutes exploring the intersection of Pinterest, the Travel & Hospitality industry, and a growing multilingual user base.

Pinterest and Its Multilingual Strategy
I’ll start with recent Pinterest news. As of Monday, June 4, Pinterest’s user interface is now available in both English and the Latin American variant of Spanish (see their announcement on the Pinterest Blog, “¡Qué Pinteresante!: Pinterest en español,” June 4, 2012). If you don’t read Spanish very well, just trust me – they announced the launch of their Spanish site.

Furthermore, Pinterest earlier announced their grand-scheme-of-things plan for localized web interfaces. “To start, we are focusing on French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, but we hope to launch in many other languages soon including Dutch, Greek, Italian, Korean, Malay, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Swedish, and Turkish” (source: Pinterest Blog, “Seeking Pinterest Translators,” May 2, 2012).

How do you think Pinterest’s localization strategy will affect the global use of the platform? You know what I think? Call me crazy, but I think it means there will be many, many more people around the world using it and spreading the 1,000 words per picture reflecting whatever’s on their minds to interested multilingual people all over the world. About things like, oh I don’t know… travel destinations maybe?

See? This just got interesting.
According to a study conducted by HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella, the seventh most popular pinned word is “places.” (Just for fun, enter “places” into the Pinterest search function, and scroll through all the pins and boards. But make sure you have hours and hours and hours of time on your hands because it’s hard to stop once you’ve started looking.)

If you’re wondering to what extent Pinterest is already being used within Travel & Hospitality, start by reading these two articles:

“Travel companies see potential in scrapbooking site Pinterest,” Travel Weekly, April 10, 2012
“Why Pinterest works in the travel industry (ESPECIALLY destinations),” Tnooz, March 5, 2012

And of COURSE Pinterest works well for Travel & Hospitality. It’s just an incredibly visually oriented industry. I remember entire evenings growing up when we’d have friends over to share my dad’s slides from our trips to Washington DC, Myrtle Beach, Disney World, etc. Photos have the magical ability to transport us from sitting on the dull green shag carpet in the basement, to enjoying the Florida sunshine with our hair blowing in the breeze… See what I mean? Even just thinking about photos does it to me.

Don’t Forget Instagram
Another component of this Travel marketing opportunity is a little photo technology marvel called Instagram. You’ve heard of this by now, yes? It’s a free photo sharing platform that has taken off in popularity the way I do every time I ask my dogs if they want a cookie.

So people take and enhance pictures with Instagram, then they share these (and other) pictures by pinning them on Pinterest. Many of the pictures have captions and descriptions with travel-related keyword phrases. They get SEO visibility, they get followers, and they get web traffic, leads and new revenue for businesses. Phew!

It’s Picture Perfect
When you combine a photo sharing mindset with a social site like Pinterest, and you apply it to Travel & Hospitality, one of the most visual industries in the world, and then localize it all for a talkative multilingual audience, I think you’ve got the perfect recipe for a new, exciting marketing opportunity.

Agree or disagree? I hope you’ll share some thoughts here – this is a fascinating area for us all. And don’t be surprised if I write more about it as things grow and evolve.

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