Why Singapore businesses should pin their hopes on Pinterest

Singaporean entrepreneurs, take heed--this is where global businesses are spending their money.

In the Fast 50 (50 fastest growing online jobs) third quarter report we released this month - a review of over 295,000 jobs on the internet, we noticed that most businesses are investing a lot of value in social media.

We've seen the rise of "Suggested" and "Sponsored" posts on Facebook and Twitter - in fact, Fast 50 reports that Social Media Marketing increased by 96% from the previous quarter, as well as Twitter and Facebook Marketing up by 50% and 20% respectively.

According to Hash Meta's study on the country's social media landscape, 70% of Singapore's population have a Facebook account, 50% were on YouTube, and 41% had Google+ accounts. Digital agency We Are Social's recent report says these people spend an average of 2.2 hours per day on social media platforms.

"Social channels continue to show strong growth over the past 12 months, with top social networks adding more than 135 million new users in the course of 2013," writes We Are Social's Simon Kemp, citing different social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Google+, QZone, Tumblr, Twitter, and the giant Facebook.

But here's where the tables are turned: this quarter, there is a meteoric rise in another social media contender - Pinterest.

With a massive growth of 1,065% in projects as seen in the Fast 50 study, it seems that Pinterest's expansion of their Promoted Pins proved to be more than effective.

Aside from that, their key product releases such as self-service ads, news tab to push out fresh content, search prioritised Rich Pins, an overhaul of their analytics platform, seem to work well with small business advertisers.

While Pinterest's user database is relatively low compared to its competitors, it hits a lucrative niche wherein 80% of their users are women. But here's the main selling point that would make business owners and markers smile - it seems that the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the website.

If businesses still need more convincing of Pinterest's power, during the holiday season of 2013, the site accounted for nearly a quarter of all social media sharing - only second to Facebook when it came to driving traffic to websites.

Simultaneously, in a research done by Infographics.SG last June 2013, there were only 96,000 Pinterest users last year, while Hash Media's study reported over 0.7 million users as of August 2014 - an astronomical 86.29% growth in over a year.

With visual marketing on the rise, there is an upsurge of demand in the design jobs online, with Photography up 24% from last quarter, Photo Editing and Photoshop both up by 29%, Illustrator projects up by 22%, and even 3D Rendering and Design up 20% and 14% respectively.

The image-driven trend has also shifted a focus on content. With more businesses aiming to build a relationship and engage their consumers, the Fast 50 report shows a huge shift of focus on original and relevant content which takes strategic planning and execution. We saw a great demand across the Freelancer.com platform on Book Writing jobs (up 30% from last quarter), Editing (21%), and Blogging (15%).

With social platforms being closely integrated in our daily life, the challenge is for businesses to keep the engagement going, to post the images and content, and to keep up with the short attention span of users.