As far as their corporate account, our favorite Pinterest board from McDonald’s (tough to choose just one) is the one that shows menu items from all over the world. As in all things food France seems to win. The French menu includes the McBaguette, Le McWrap Chevre and even Macarons.

Unfortunately for McDonald’s, someone beat them to their name. So instead of Pinterest.com/McDonalds (taken by someone with the last name McDonald) they had to take Pinterest.com/McDonaldsCorp

This seems to be a trend. Pizza Hut doesn’t have Pinterest.com/Pizzahut – interesting enough they don’t even have a food board. Instead Pizza Hut uses Pinterest for recruiting employees!

Pinterest tells you who repins what you have on Pinterest but they don’t tell you about original pins. PinAlerts sends you an email with original pins – or whenever people pin something from directly from your website. What surprised us is that McDonald’s doesn’t get a huge volume of pins (you should see how many pins there are from Zappos or Food Network!).

What are People Pinning from McDonald’s website?
From our tracking we can see what people pin on Pinterest. It’s their favorite menu items. McDonalds.com has a full graphic-based menu on the site. People go to this and pin what they love. You’d think it would be all hamburgers and french fries but it’s not. There’s a huge variety.

We couldn’t find a Pinterest account for Burger King or any pins from their website. We found this fun board from an individual. http://pinterest.com/nays/my-burger-king-board/ which included this wacky knit burger fashion statement (with sesame seeds on top):

Pinterest can showcase new or unknown menu items (we wish they’d note which state or countries offered the items).

For example, we didn’t know that McDonald’s has smores pies or soft serve ice cream dipped in chocolate until we saw a PinAlert like this:

Lessons learned from McDonald’s:

If you’re a restaurant or in the food business, make it easy for people to pin their favorite menu item and share it with their friends (with their comments) on Pinterest.

Create standalone images of your most popular dishes or individual images of everything on your menu.

Other Fast Food Restaurants Getting Pinned, Not Burger King
For some reason Burger King is not popular on Pinterest, even though they have images of every menu item too. Any guesses as to why? Is it because more moms like McDonalds and men (who are less interested in Pinterest) like Burger King?

Subway is getting pinned. So is Pizza Hut, KFC and Wendy’s. Just not Burger King.

]]> http://pinalerts.com/blog/mcdonalds-and-pinterest-what-are-people-pinning/feed/ 1 http://pinalerts.com/blog/pinalerts-update-check-out-our-new-pinterest-worthy-look/ http://pinalerts.com/blog/pinalerts-update-check-out-our-new-pinterest-worthy-look/#comments Wed, 13 Jun 2012 18:33:09 +0000 Team http://pinalerts.com/blog/?p=118 If you’ve ever gotten a PinAlert you may have noticed the email was a bit plain. We’ve recently updated PinAlerts emails to be more fitting for Pinterest. Our email is more beautiful than ever. We also added some new features that you requested.

We added:

• a graphic header
• a thumbnail image of each pin
• the name of the person who pinned an image from your site
• the name of the board the image was pinned to

Here’s a screenshot of a recent PinAlert from FoodNetwork.

What do you think of our new look?

PinAlerts will send an email alert whenever someone pins something from a site you’re tracking. It’s a great way to get insights into what your readers are interested in.

We based PinAlerts off the model of Google Alerts. Sure you can check Pinterest manually but it gets unwieldy if you check multiple web sites. It doesn’t show a complete history or list of all of your pins. Now you don’t have to remember and the pins are delivered directly to you. Like Google Alerts you can choose how often to get alerts.

One of our favorite features of PinAlerts is reading what people write in their descriptions. We think you’ll agree that it’s quite flattering to see. PinAlerts are also helpful to see what is working for Pinterest so you can fine tune your marketing efforts.

Go sign up for PinAlerts (choose “register” your first time) and let us know what you think. We designed a handy “how to” graphic to help you get started. If you like PinAlerts we hope you’ll share it with your friends and Pin it.

Keep in mind that we have more plans to improve PinAlerts and we’re still in beta. As always we welcome any feedback or suggestions on how we could improve PinAlerts.

If you like PinAlerts please share – here are some suggested tweets and Facebook updates that you can use or edit. Of course you could also pin the instructographic below.

Pre-written tweets {Copy & Paste to Share}

• New Pinterest Tool! PinAlerts.com Tracks What’s Getting Pinned on your Website.
• I just started using @PinAlerts a cool new tool to help me see what’s being pinned from my site on Pinterest.
• Check out this new #Pinterest Tool PinAlerts.com – It Tracks What’s Getting Pinned From Your Blog! cc. @pinalerts

Pre-written facebook posts

• Just found PinAlerts.com, a new tool that lets me see who is pinning stuff from my blog onto Pinterest.
• Are you on Pinterest, or want to see what’s showing up on Pinterest from your website? Check out this new tool http://www.PinAlerts.com

PinAlerts is a great tool to get insight not only for your own web site or blog, but to get insights into your industry. What are people pinning to Pinterest from other blogs in your niche? You can gain insights by looking at people that have a much larger following than you do.

A big player in social media and tech is Guy Kawasaki. Of all of the people I follow using PinAlerts, he’s got the most pins. I bet he would love what the person who pinned his picture said about him!

It’s notable that almost everyone starts a board for books they love. Since Guy’s an author of several books, it’s not surprising that most of the pins from his web site are for his books. Even though the recent pins are for What the Plus! there are also pins for his other books Enchantment and The Art of the Start.

Here’s an example of a pin from Guy’s web site www.GuyKawasaki.com

There were many pins of his book on May 3rd (see the snapshot of a PinAlert below) which makes us conclude he probably did something that day to encourage pins.

Here are some lessons from watching what is being pinned on GuyKawasaki.com

1. Guy pins his own books, sometimes more than once. Sometimes he gives offers in his descriptions. You should too.
2. People pin your headshot from your website or blog. So make sure it’s pinnable (good).
3. People are marketing for Guy through the descriptions they write about his books.
4. Books are very pinnable, making Pinterest an ideal place for authors to market their books. Pinterest also gives you one more reason to make your book cover worthy of a pin.

Sign up for PinAlerts and see what people are pinning about you.