B uyable Pins Could Turn Pinterest into a Power Player
Photo from Pinterest Blog
Currently if I find something I want to buy on Pinterest, I click the link, zip off to another site and make my purchase. There are three problems with this arrangement:
1) I have to click more buttons to get what I want
2) Pinterest gets nothing from the exchange
3) My compulsive need to pin things has been interrupted.
To fix this, Pinterest will be releasing a special category of pin in mobile apps called Buyable Pins. When the little blue button that says BUY appears in the corner of a pin, all I have to do is click it and confirm which card I want to use to make the purchase. After that, I’m back to pinning images of funny quotes over awkward cats.
The significance of this addition cannot be overstated. If the Buyable Pins take off, Pinterest could leave Facebook in the dust and turn its attention to competing with titans like Amazon and Google.
Facebook knows who your friends are. Google knows what you’re interested in. Amazon knows what you actually purchase.
Pinterest is the only company positioned to be capable of all three.
In competition with Facebook, Pinterest started as a social media platform. It knows who you follow and what boards interest you most. Like Google, Pinterest is a search engine; a powerful visual search engine. Pinners spend less time coasting through the constructed feed created by Pinterest’s algorithms and go right for the search bar.
With the addition of Buyable Pins, Pinterest will know what Amazon knows: what its users actually spend their money on and how much they’re willing to pay. In time, Pinterest will learn users’ purchasing habits and will know the perfect moment to put a promoted pin in front of a pinner.
Unfortunately, Pinterest’s current advertising platform is simplistic. If you have any experience with Facebook’s Dark Posts, the tools available to businesses on Pinterest are, at best, blunt. After selecting your promoted pin’s search terms, language, location, device and gender are the only options you’re given to find your audience.
But there’s plenty they do right. Ads appear native in a user’s feed. The audience will be actively searching for products like the one you sell. And if they’re not ready to buy, they may still pin it to a board to be considered later.
At any point down the line, the creator of an ad can look at the Buyable Pin and see who has pinned it and the board they’ve pinned it to. That is a goldmine of information for an advertiser. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with the Pinterest ecosystem, now is the time.
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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