Pinterest News - A few Pinteresting developments

by Startacus Admin

Those of you who are regular visitors to Startacus or indeed our Pinterest account will have noticed that recently we've had a renewed vigour in our musings about the image sharing site (check out our Pinterest Analytics article for info on how it can help your business).

It seems our new interest in Pinterest could not have come at a better time as the site’s CEO Ben Silderman has just made two exciting revelations about its future. First on the agenda it will be taking its cue from other sites such as Facebook and Twitter by introducing promoted pins, opening up a whole range of marketing opportunities. Secondly they have updated their article 'pin it' feature in the hope of spreading the site’s focus to include written content as well as images.

Some will shudder in horror at the thought of yet more social media advertising and a possible watering down of the site’s original purpose whilst others will be thrilled at the chance to use an as yet untapped resource - we’ll let you make up your own mind...

Promoted Pins

These do exactly what it says on the tin (or pin if you prefer)... basically Pinterest will allow certain businesses to pay a fee to have their pins given prominence in search results, with the hope that this will drive traffic to their site or increase sales. If you take Twitter and Facebook as a guide, the potential gains from such social media marketing are huge for both Pinterest and the businesses using it. In the past year Facebook has promoted nearly 8 million posts with the result that some companies have seen a tenfold increase in the reach of their marketing material on the site. Factor in the fact that Pinterest already accounts for 17.4% of e-commerce sites’ revenue from social media and this announcement could mean big bucks for everyone involved.

Of course the introduction of advertising on the site raises many issues (and many an eyebrow) about the future of Pinterest and how it interacts with and influences its users, concerns which Silderman is quick to dispel in his blog announcement. “I know some of you will be thinking 'oh great here come the banner ads' but we are determined not to let that happen. While we haven't figured out all the details, I can say that promoted pins will be tasteful, transparent, relevant and improved based on your feedback”

Promoted pins are currently in the testing stage and we can expect an announcement in the near future telling us whether or not they intend to roll out the feature across the board. We will be watching with keen interest to see what Pinterest does next and if they will keep the reassuring promises made by their CEO.

Article Pinning

Over the past months we have been sending telepathic thoughts to the folks in the Pinterest office to develop a feature which would help with the sharing of images connected to written content - and we hope that this time it has finally worked.

Over 5 million articles are shared every day on Pinterest and those of you who, like us, browse the site to discover interesting content will know that the design thus far hasn't exactly made that an easy task. There's normally a severe lack of information about the article you were considering reading - in fact sometimes there was no more than a link, which would hardly compel you to check it out.

Mercifully for readers and publishers alike the announcement of the site’s new 'Article pins' feature informed us that the headline, author, description and link will now be displayed right on the pin. Any articles which you have uploaded to this point will automatically be updated to the new system so you don’t have to do anything at all

Pinterest have also introduced a bookmark type service whereby you can save articles which you would like to read at a later time to your own 'reading list board' which can also be categorised in the same way as your image boards. But it doesn’t stop there, you will also be able to browse the reading lists of others to help you find even more stuff that you would like to read or just have a nosy at what they are currently interested in.

We realise that for some, this announcement of updated 'article pins' and promoted pins represents a dilution of Pinterest's original intentions but others will commend them for having the foresight and engagement to spot what users want from the site and tailoring it to suit. We are not completely decided yet so needless to say there will almost certainly be another Pinterest themed article coming your way in the near future.

If you are interested in the use of visual material in social media, have at look at our recent article on using Vine for business.

 

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• #pinterest
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Published on: 8th October 2013