CVBs on Pinterest: March update

I first blogged about CVBs on Pinterest on February 22. Within these past 3 weeks, the list of US and Canadian CVBs has increased from 34 to 110. The number of international DMOs also increased from 3 to 26 DMOs.

For this post, we’ll just focus on US and Canadian CVBs and DMOs.

One of the more important Pinterest engagement metrics is the number of repins an account receives. This is almost impossible for me to calculate manually as I’d have to look at each pin and tally the numbers for each CVB. This is why I focus mostly on the number of followers and the number of pins. The number of followers can determine an account’s reach while the number of pins shows how active/dedicated the account really is.

As a side note, a few CVBs got a head start and secured their accounts really early in the game. Users followed these accounts even though there was/is little or no activity. This is why I prefer a combination of followers and pins.

It’s no surprise that Visit Savannah is still in the lead in both number of followers and pins. With 12,422 followers, they actually have almost twice the amount of followers of all the other accounts combined (7,151 followers). The second highest is Wyoming Tourism with 775 followers. All the other CVBs have less than 400 followers.

Visit Savannah (1,090 pins) also has over double the amount of pins of any other CVB. The next closest CVB is Visit Salt Lake with 504 pins. Just beyond that are Experience Columbus (442 pins), SeeMonterey (409 pins) and VISIT Milwaukee (399 pins).

Now let’s look a little deeper.

Most of the CVBs have a similar growth rate in regards to their number of followers. Here are the top 7 CVBs with the most followers. Visit Savannah was not included since their growth rate would be off of this chart.

There are a few exceptions to this growth rate:

The Outer Banks grew from 32 followers on March 4 to 172 followers on March 11. My assumption for this growth is just promotion of the account. There was a Facebook post (over 218,000 fans) as well as a tweet about their Pinterest account between those dates.

VisitNC also saw a huge increase from 55 followers on March 4 to 158 followers on March 11.

Baltimore Maryland add 37 followers this past week. Even though it’s a smaller increase, it’s still well above the curve.

Two DMOs I think you should watch are VISIT FLORIDA and Virginia is for Lovers. Even though Virginia has yet to pin an image, they already have 84 followers, an increase of 42 followers from the previous week.

Let’s look at the number of pins.

Visit Savannah has consistently pinned approximately 113 pins per week. On average, that’s 16 pins per day, including weekends. I think a lot of Pinterest users probably pin that same daily amount.

Examining the CVBs just below Visit Savannah, you can see that most of them pin around 10-20 pins per week. One notable exception is FredericksburgTX CVB. They are very active and will probably move up a great deal by next month.

What type of boards are CVBs using?

One of the most time-consuming parts of my analysis is categorizing CVBs’ Pinterest boards by themes. Imagine a color-coded google doc with 77 rows and 153 columns. And this is only data collected from 76 of the CVBs.

The General Destination category includes neighborhoods, colleges or universities and cities for county or state DMOs. Most of the other categories are self-explanatory.

There are a lot of boards in the Other/Fun category. Some of these were pretty random boards while others just didn’t fit into any other category.

Does the ratio of these image categories replicate those on your CVB’s site?

What I expected to see in this analysis was a larger percentage for Culinary, Weddings and Scenic Pinterest boards since those are some of the more popular categories on Pinterest. What surprised me the most were the Seasonal and Holiday boards. I understand creating boards for Winter Activities but there were even a few for holidays such as Valentine’s Day.

I like how some CVBs are using Pinterest boards to promote their PR or Meetings niche. If you’re looking to follow more of what CVBs are doing online, check out our Brag Board for Tourism Geeks Pinterest board.

Had enough analysis?

Even though Pinterest is still a very new channel, you need to develop an ever-evolving strategy and stick with it to get the best results. Pinterest is not one of those sites where you can set it up and leave it alone. It needs weekly, if not daily, management. However, if you don’t have time to maintain your presence here, I think an inactive Pinterest account is better than no account at all.

Feel free to use my CVBs on Pinterest board as a reference for following your favorite destinations. If your CVB is not on that board, please email anne@annehornyak or share it as a comment below.