Douglas A. Ferguson at the College of Charleston and Clark F. Greer at Liberty University performed a content analysis of 85 local television stations’ Pinterest boards, in order to see how social media effects branding. Researchers mainly focused on the boards themselves and coded them in reference to four aspects: community, lifestyle (which included pets and animals), news, and television station promotion. In addition, the number of followers, re-pins of each board, likes, and comments were noted for each board.
The results found that community boards have more engagement than lifestyle boards. In addition, lifestyle boards had more followers than promotion boards. Fox and NBC station boards had more followers overall.
“Boards dedicated to promotion had fewer repins than boards carrying images associated with lifestyle. Also, the number people who followed promotion boards trailed the number of followers of both lifestyle and community boards. This suggests that audiences are primarily interested in sharing content that is largely unrelated to the station rather than conveying station personalities to other Pinterest followers.”
The full text of the study can be found here:
http://bit.ly/2sACFfW