(20 September 2012) South Africa’s online marketplace, bobshop.co.za, finalised its first Pinterest competition, joining only a handful of South African companies that have run similar promotions on this fairly new social sharing site.

“As a visual media outlet which allows users to create boards and populate them with images, Pinterest is an excellent channel for showcasing the wealth of products available for sale on Bob Shop”, says Joni Calitz, Bob Shop Marketing Manager.

Participants entered by creating a Make Me a Beautiful Bride board on Pinterest and filling it with bridal gowns and other wedding items featured on Bob Shop.

More than two hundred brides-to-be entered the competition. The winner, announced this week, was chosen by Bob Shop based on a number of criteria, including the quality of the images chosen, the overall look and feel of the board, the volume of pins and followers and the amount of interaction that the participant achieved for her board.

The prize for the best board was R6000 for the bride-to-be to spend on Bob Shop on her wedding dress and accessories.

The Bob Shop wedding items category features more than six thousand items. More than five thousand of them are wedding dresses, with prices ranging from under R1000 to about R10,000. In an average month, one wedding dress gets sold every day on the site. Bob Shop has a number of top wedding dress designers and sellers marketing their garments using the online platform. As a rule, dresses are custom made. The bride-to-be chooses the design, the fabrics, the exact shade she wants and sends in her measurements. It can take four to six week for the dress to be made and delivered, usually with the contact details of the nearest tailor, in case any small alterations are needed.

"Our Pinterest wedding dress competition allowed us to create a content-driven campaign in which people interacted with Bob Shop across social platforms”, says the Bob Shop Marketing Manager.

“Of course”, she adds, “we were aware that the local adoption of Pinterest is still relatively small. However, the visual focus of Pinterest was the right choice for bridal wear, and we are quite happy if, as a side effect, our competition encouraged some of our users and our connections on Facebook or Twitter to register their own Pinterest accounts.

“In future, we will continue to use various channels to award existing users and to attract new ones to South Africa’s biggest online marketplace that brings together sellers and buyers, enabling them to trade directly with each other”, concludes Joni Calitz.