526 CHAPTER 15 E-COMMUNICATIONEtsy, an e-commerce website with handmade, vintage, art and craft items is one of the most followed brands
(94 250 followers in June 2012) and displays a huge variety of boards conveying its personality.
Different travel agencies, such as Travel Channel with 17 156 followers and Thomas Cook (organised per country),
are providing visual inspiration on where to book your next holiday.
GAP (8610 followers) is showcasing popular products, gift guides, new collections, icons and inspirations for
using old T-shirts for DIY projects, as well as specific pinboards of its major designers.
British brands are starting experiments with Pinterest. In April 2012, Harrods invited customers to create a mood
board, which was the inspiration for a ‘Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Street Party’ window. To take part in this
Pinterest competition your board had to be titled ‘Harrods Street Party Window’ and, once completed, a tweet
needed to be sent to Harrods containing a link to your board including the hashtag #HarrodsWindows. Harrods
promoted the competition on its Facebook page (202 000 fans) and via its Twitter account (101 000 followers).
The competition drew on people’s love of taking pictures and intersected well with what Pinterest can deliver. On
its own Pinterest page Harrods also created a themed board including images of past Harrods window displays to
inspire potential competition participants. The winner was brought to London and put up in a top hotel in advance
of the official unveiling of the window.^188
The popularity of Pinterest is a consequence of consumers feeling increasingly more comfortable with recom-
mendations from friends or other users when they come through social personalisation.^189 Pinterest is more trusted
as an information source than Facebook and Twitter by general Internet users. But Pinterest is also seen as a place
‘to have fun’, as well as ‘get product information’ and ‘find out about new products’.^190
Communities on Pinterest are less about friends and more about common interests. The Liverpool Football Club
was the first Premier League club to launch Pinterest boards aiming to appeal to a broad cross-section of its sup-
porter base. Boards include among others ‘Liverpool Legends’ to track some of the greatest players and managers
in Liverpool Football Club’s history, ‘ The Greatest Fans in the World’, a photo tribute to the supporters who follow
Liverpool, and even ‘LFC Cakes’, a collection of club-themed cakes and cupcakes.^191While the USA leads with the highest number of Twitter accounts, 107.7 million by the end
of 2011, the Netherlands has the most active users. While many statistics are about the number
of users on Twitter, and the social network’s growth in general, it is more interesting to see how
active those users actually are. Globally, the percentage of accounts posting a tweet during a three-
month period remains at 27%. Th is means that at least 73% of those millions of accounts were
dormant for at least three months. Th e Netherlands has the most active accounts with 33% of
them posting a tweet in the three-month period. Other active countries are Japan, Spain, the
USA and Indonesia. Th is low percentage of active users highlights the fact that a vast number
of Twitter users are choosing to use the social network to consume information, rather than
share it. Th is reinforces the idea that only a small percentage of Twitter users are producing
most of the shared content.^192 In October 2011, Yahoo Research revealed that 50% of the most
infl uential tweets consumed are generated from just 20 000 elite users. Th e remaining Twitter
users merely retweet or rebroadcast the highly infl uential content. Media present the bulk of
the information, and celebrities are the most followed.^193 When we look at the global ranking
of the accounts having the largest group of followers, we see that indeed celebrities take the lead:
Lady Gaga with 25 million followers (her Facebook account has 51.5 million fans) followed
by Justin Bieber with 22.6 million followers (Facebook page with 43.8 million fans) and Katy
Perry with 20.4 million followers (Facebook page with 43.5 million fans). Th e fi rst international
brand in the Twitter ranking is Star bucks Coff ee with 2.6 million followers, whereas its Facebook
page has 30.2 million fans.^194 JetBlue Airways, now ranked in seventh place in the Twitter Brands
charts with 1.7 million followers, was among the fi rst corporate companies to join Twitter in- JetBlue is oft en cited as an example of small corporate twittering. It joined Twitter to
help its customers. By simply asking, it found out what the customers wanted. Th e company
found that customer service tweets generated more followers and replies, and tweets about
M15_PELS3221_05_SE_C15.indd 526M15_PELS3221_05_SE_C15.indd 526 6/6/13 8:55 AM6/6/13 8:55 AM