Taste of Home's mission is to provide a fulfilling experience for our millions of devoted readers who look to us for cooking inspiration and to make their everyday lives all the more positive. Pinterest allows us to do just that. Not only is our page devoted to sharing recipes and food-based content to inspire and educate our community, but it's also a safe space where our loyal fan base can communicate with each other.
Pinterest has always been a platform that truly represents the food area, so it seemed natural for our team to use it to further our message. It allows us to produce visually beautiful images that give new life to our content.
In the middle of 2017, we wanted to find a way to strengthen the community by giving them a safe and trusted environment to consume and share our content. Pinterest was the natural route—it's positive, it's unbiased, it's encouraging, it's aspirational.
We looked closer into which recipes and food-related content our followers were interested in. We developed aesthetically pleasing long pins based off our recipes to give our home cooks a more highlighted voice (the recipes we share are created by regular home cooks/readers—which separates us from the competition).
This led to the realization that our audience wasn't just interested in recipes—they responded strongly to content that taught them something, saved time, and, most importantly, improved their daily lives.
We went through a complete overhaul of our image inventory to ensure we were sharing the most attractive photos to tell our story. We created several different templates to share these images in the most beautiful way possible.
At the end of each day, our goal is to know we've strengthened our relationship with our community—and Pinterest is the reason we've been so successful in this area.
The numbers we saw from Pinterest referral traffic were incredible by the end of 2017. We exceeded all social traffic goals, which helped increase revenue for the brand.
A few highlights include:
*Pinterest is up 107% in visits referral traffic to TasteOfHome.com month over month (as of 12/2017).
*Pinterest is up 114% in page views referral traffic to TasteOfHome.com month over month (as of 12/2017).
*Taste of Home is the #2 most engaged magazine brand on Pinterest, according to the Association of Magazine Media's (MPA) latest fourth quarter report.
*Our following has grown to more than 520,000.
