Pinterest Features and Trends
When utilising social media for your business, it’s important to be aware of the latest trends and features and be ready to take full advantage of them. To ensure you stay ahead of the curve, we’ve compiled a list of the latest features and trends on the inspiration app that is gaining popularity as a visual search engine and lead generator: Pinterest.
Promoted Pins
While not yet available in South Africa, promoted pins are already proving invaluable in those countries where it has been rolled out, as it allows businesses to promote their pins (images, videos, or carousels) as adverts to particular target audiences. Promoted pins also allow users to buy items straight through the pin by taking them directly to the business’s ecommerce website. This will be an exceptionally useful tool for lead generation as evidenced by statistics reported by Pinterest in May this year; the number of Pinners who have engaged with shoppable Product Pins has increased 44% year-over-year, and total traffic to retailers has increased by 2.3 year-over-year.
AR Filters – Try On by Lens
Another new and exciting feature, the AR filter “Try On”, allows Pinterest users to “try on” make-up by selected brands by using the Pinterest camera to see how it will look on their face and skin tone. Pinterest have also integrated this filter with their “skin tone range” feature so Pinners can view similar lip shades on skin tones that match their own. According to a survey by Invesp, a conversion optimization company, 77% of customers prefer to use augmented reality capabilities to preview product variations and 61% prefer to make purchases on platforms that offer augmented reality technology. While this feature is also not yet available in South Africa, it is clear that the first businesses to jump on this trend will certainly reap the benefits.
Visual Search
In 2015, Pinterest released a unique visual search tool that allows Pinners to take a picture of an item and search for Pins with similar products or content. You can even select the specific part within the image that you are interested in and filter the results by topic. Zooming in can also allow you to see what the item is called (according to the person or business who published it) so you can see what words you can use to describe the style or product when searching for it in the future. According to research by Pinterest, 80% of Pinners start with visual search when shopping and 49% of Pinners say they develop a better relationship with brands they love through visual search. This highlights the real benefit of using this platform to its full potential.
Pinterest Shopping
Earlier this year, Pinterest partnered with Shopify to allow businesses to utilize a range of shopping features including tag installation, catalogue integration, automatic daily updating of products as well as an ads buying interface. The new app functionality automatically creates a connection between the store and Pinterest so businesses don’t need to make use of development resources. Product Pins show that they are shoppable and include a product title, availability, price and a description and also include metadata to improve SEO ranking and make these products easier to find within their categories. Encouragingly, Pinterest reports that catalogue feed uploads increased 144% in the first quarter of the year (due in part to early beta testing with Shopify) which emphasizes the benefit of this feature to businesses. Like some other features, this is not available in South Africa just yet.
Shopping Spotlight
Another 2020 feature, Pinterest released a new product recommendation tool called “Shopping Spotlights” which creates a feed that shows products chosen by a list publishers and influencers handpicked by Pinterest. This feature allows users to see curated content based on Pinterest’s most recent trends.
Pincodes
To help brands drive potential customers from related items they see in the real world to businesses’ websites, online stores, or their products/services as they are displayed on Pinterest, Pinterest has developed “Pincodes”. Similar to a QR code, users can use their camera function in the Pinterst app to scan the code wherever they find it to take them through to particular pins or boards on Pinterest. There are infinite ways to use this functionality but to provide some real world applications; retailers can put their pincodes on physical advertisements such as billboards or posters to direct people to their website or online store, businesses can place their pincode in a magazine to direct readers to a website for more information or even put their pincode on their packaging to direct them to a board with ways to use the product.
Staying on top of the latest trends and using them to best effect for your business can be challenging. Why not leave it to the social media professionals? Black Snow Group not only provides and implements detailed and fully customized social media strategies, we also ensure that they reflect the latest in digital innovation.
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