Tag Archive for: Pinterest

Pinterest is expanding its Shop the Look Pins to all business accounts.

 

Shop the Look Pins aren’t exactly a new type of Pin but instead is a tool that allows businesses to tag products in photos to provide a seamless shopping experience.

The tool was previously exclusive to big brands who purchased advertising through third-party services like Pinterest Marketing Partners Olapic and Curalate. Now, however, all brands can add Shop the Look Pins through a self-serve tool.

Shop the Look Pins appear as simple white dots which can be moved to ensure they are always helping add information without blocking the product itself. When a user clicks one of the dots, it will expand to provide extra information such as pricing, availability, and a link to immediately purchase the product.

While the company didn’t release specific data about the effectiveness of Shop the Look Pins so far, it believes the new tool will help drive engagement and encourage conversions for businesses.

To help reinforce that point, the company said that of its 250 million monthly users, approximately two-thirds have engaged with new products from businesses. More than 90% say they use Pinterest to plan their future purchases, making them a prime audience for brands.

The company also noted that Pins have a significantly longer lifespan than most social media content which loses inertia after several days, if not hours. Pinterest claims that Pins can drive significant engagement for up to 120 days.

One could argue social media has always been a popularity contest based on friend-counts and likes, but Pinterest is making it even more explicit thanks to some new changes to business profiles.

The most notable change is the addition of a monthly viewer statistic that can be seen by everyone, not just your account administrators. The feature will show the total number of people who saw your business’s pins over the past 30 days.

The addition of a view count is likely to provide a more reliable estimate of just how prominent a page is. While followers can easily be bought or acquired with bots, views are a little trickier to misrepresent.

However, many might say this gives an unfair advantage to businesses who advertise through promoted pins.

In addition to the view count, Pinterest is also introducing the ability for business profiles to include dynamic cover images that highlight specific content relevant to users. That can include individual pins or entire boards.

Pinterest says the changes will be rolling out over the next couple months, so keep your eyes out for more news about how monthly viewer statistics may affect your Pins.

Pinterest is expanding their platform – directly into Facebook’s. Hoping to create some synergy that will bring in new users, Pinterest is launching new features directly available from Facebook’s Messenger.

The new features, built around a chatbot for Messenger, make it possible to use Pinterest without ever having to actually open Pinterest.

According to Pinterest, the move is actually just capitalizing on the social platform’s already existing presence on the site. Each week, nearly 1 million pins have been shared from Pinterest across Messenger before the launch of the cross-platform features.

Pinterest’s Facebook Chatbot

Pinterest’s new chatbot will allow users to browse Pinterest’s site and content with guided advice and recommendations. When you start a conversation with the chatbot, it will ask you to choose from a list of categories – such as “trending,” “food,” and “home.” Based on your choice, the bot will then show you a carousel of pins from that category.

You can also directly search Pinterest with text queries, however, you can not use the platform’s visual search technology by sending in pictures for similar pins.

While users might find this service to be a useful way to quickly find the pins they are most interested in, advertisers might be disgruntled to learn that the Chatbot will not include Promoted Pins.

Native Pins for Messenger

In the past, when you clicked on a pin that was shared on Messenger it would automatically open in Pinterest’s site or app. Now, pins will open within Messenger itself, thanks to the Chat Extensions feature.

Facebook’s Chat Extensions feature is designed to allow users to interact with content from other brand’s sites or apps without leaving messenger, therefore also making it easier to share that content again within Messenger.

Pinterest is using this to deliver Pins directly to users on Messenger, as well as including a gallery of Related Pins and a search bar to find more pins.

With these, users will be able to find and share pins within Messenger without ever having to leave the conversation they are having with their friends.

Interestingly, Facebook is also allowing Pinterest to generate revenue with this chat extensions. If a person’s Facebook account is connected to their Pinterest account, Pinterest will also include Promoted Pins within the Related Pins section and search results shown through the chat extension.

Pinterest just hit a major milestone and they are celebrating by teasing several new features coming soon.

According to a blog post last week, Pinterest officially surpassed 200 million monthly active users, representing more than 40% growth since last year. Notably, more than half of these users live outside the USA which shows how Pinterest is progressing as a global platform.

At the time of the milestone, Pinterest says that over 100 billion pins had been created. It also notes that 85% of all searches on the platform come from mobile devices.

Of course, the company isn’t using the milestone as an opportunity to relax or slow down. The announcement hints at several features planned for the near future.

“You’ve told us what you want to see next, so we’re building them—it’s that simple,” Pinterest says.

For example, pinch-to-zoom functionality has been widely requested and is slated to be released soon. But, that’s just the beginning. Pinterest is also starting to test “boards-within-boards”, allowing users to create subcategories for their Pinterest boards.

Over the next few weeks, Pinterest will be sending invitations to select users to begin testing the feature – as well testing other new ideas.

The platform is keeping mum about any other projects or features they have coming down the pipeline, but the milestone announcement says you can expect to hear more in the near future.

Pinterest has seemingly been testing autoplay video ads forever, but most advertisers haven’t been able to get in on the fun. The video ads were limited to just a small number of big advertising firms and massive brands, while local businesses or small brands made do with picture-based ad formats.

That all changed this morning when Pinterest announced its Promoted Video ads are now officially available to everyone. Anyone can sign up and start running their own autoplay video ads on both search results and within users’ feeds.

Unlike other platforms like Facebook or Twitter, Pinterest is avoiding providing analytics for the ads through their own measurement systems. Instead, they are aiming to avoid potential conflicts of interest by partnering with third-party metrics companies Moat and Nielson.

“One of the unique differentiations for video on Pinterest was that it’s not only about inspiration, but it also helps people do things,” Mike Bidgoli, product lead at Pinterest, told AdWeek. “Obviously the format moved to autoplay, which made it easier for advertisers to be able to buy and measure the same way that they are with everything else. The overarching point is that we wanted video to have third-party measurement from the get-go.”

The company also says that carrying your existing video campaigns over to Pinterest is simple because they follow “the same creative standards as the rest of the industry.”

You can get started sharing your own video ads on Pinterest through their self-serve service, Pinterest Ads Manager.

Everyone knows social media is fickle. You can share something you think is great and get no response, while an offhand post that you threw up blows up with likes, comments, and shares. So what makes the difference?

Of course, there are countless reasons that some things perform better than others on social media, but one of the biggest factors is likely something you haven’t considered – timing.

Timing really is everything on social media, but it can be hard to discern exactly when the best time is for you to start posting. The right time on Twitter may not be the right time on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Complicating things more, the best times are different for varying industries.

So, how do you figure out when the right time is for you? You could just try different things until something works, but I suggest using the infographic below to take a more informed approach.

The infographic from CoSchedule combines all the best data about timing on social media to give you a complete guide for discovering the prime time for your social media activity. Check it out below or head over to CoSchedule’s site for a more in-depth breakdown.

Pinterest has become one of the most reliable social media sites for retailers and brands hoping to gain a following, so it should be no surprise it is also developing one of the most extensive advertising platforms.

Over the past year, the social network has expanded its ad platform in several ways, including partnering with Kenshoo and improving their visual search functions. Still, many have been hesitant about investing heavily in an ad service that isn’t run by Facebook or Google.

There are perhaps several reasons Pinterest’s ad service has seen relatively slow adoption by most online brands, but the biggest is probably the most simple: it’s different. Instead of following the established systems of the other big online ad platforms, Pinterest has strived to maintain the visual nature and originality that have been central to its entire service.

While this may make their ads less obnoxious and more cohesive with Pinterest’s normal content, it also creates a hurdle for advertisers who don’t understand exactly what is being offered or how the ad service works.

To help make everything clear, Croud put together a suitably visual guide explaining Pinterest’s platform, why marketers are using the platform, and what options are open to marketers of every level – from Fortune 500 to “mom and pop”. Find out what the deal is with Pinterest ads below or click the image to view the full-size version:

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Pinterest has made visual search a fundamental part of their service, letting users find products and objects based on similar photos. Now, it is bringing visual search to its Chrome browser extension, which lets you search for images without ever visiting Pinterest.

After installing the extension, all you have to do is hover over any image and click on the little magnifying glass that pops up in the corner. You can then highlight the specific area or object you want to search for.

You can also right-click on the background of any web page you visit to see visual results based on the images on that page.

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“You can even search for specific items inside an image, like that one interesting chair in the corner of a living room,” Kent Brewster, front-end engineer, Pinterest, wrote in a blog post. “Just resize the selected area to pinpoint the part of the image you want to search.”

Once you’ve selected the object you want to search for, you can then refine your search using related topics, such as sunglasses, eyewear, or frames in the image above.

“You can refine your results by topic using the Pinterest search guides,” Brewster noted. “To go even deeper into your search, click any result and pinpoint whatever part of the new image you want to explore.”

For now, Pinterest’s browser extension won’t include Buyable Pins or Promoted Pins in its search results. But, I would wager those will be integrated in the near future.

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Pinterest has been teasing its leap into search advertising for months, if not years. While the company is still yet to open its search advertising platform for all businesses, it continues to test search ads with a limited number of partners.

Now, the company says it will open its ad product to a wider number of advertisers and indicates it is getting ready to expand further.

As the announcement points out, Pinterest currently reaches over 150 million unique monthly users around the world, with over half of its users residing outside America.

“When people come to Pinterest, they’re starting earlier in their decision-making process,” said Jon Kaplan, global head of partnerships at Pinterest. “We saw this with the holidays — people were pinning holiday ideas as early as August. For brands, the implications to our business, that’s an amazing opportunity to reach someone at the earliest stages of decision-making.”

To underscore that idea, Kaplan also points out users conduct over 2 billion searches on Pinterest a month – making up approximately half of the site’s activity.

According to Kaplan, the thing that separates Pinterest’s ads from other platforms is the visual nature. While services like Google deliver text rich ads, Pinterest prefers to let pictures do the bulk of the talking.

“When you search for something like modern furniture, a lot of times a text query doesn’t capture the nuances of your individual tastes or what you actually want to see. So having something that’s visual in nature for a lot of different queries is actually the most powerful way of demonstration or displaying.”

In the past, Pinterest allowed advertisers to target ads using keywords such as “furniture,” which would show ads alongside the site’s relevant organic content. Now, the company says the ads will appear immediately after a person enters a search term.

For now, the social media platform is still limiting its search ads to its partners and companies advertising through the Kenshoo marketing suite. However, it says it plans to eventually offer an open self-serve digital ad service, similar to Google’s.

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Pinterest is giving business pages a makeover that highlights their boards and buyable pins – just in time for the holidays.

The biggest change is the addition of the new rotating showcase. This allows you to show off up to five of your boards and your buyable pins all in one, easy-to-view location.

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“You can use the new showcase space to highlight anything from seasonal content to your all-time best ideas – whatever helps tell the unique story of your business,” according to Pinterest.

The rotating showcase can be updated as often as you like, which means you can use it for a whole host of things. For example, you can update your showcase to put a seasonal spin on your page or share items on sale for a limited time.

That isn’t all that Pinterest is rolling out, though. The site is also making several cosmetic changes to business pages:

  • New tabs are available for organizing your boards and pins.
  • Pins you’ve liked are now only visible to you.
  • The showcase will replace your most recent pins on mobile.
  • You can now pick new board covers from mobile devices.

The company says it has also tweaked its layouts to ensure a more consistent experience from smartphone to desktop, and everywhere in between.

“The boards you showcase, the cover images you choose for each board—they look the same no matter where people choose to view your profile.”

The changes have already begun to roll out to all devices and should be available to all users.