New Pinterest Features Enhance Strategy & Analytics


March 21, 2013

new pinterest features

Pinterest took the social scene by storm after launching its beta in 2010. Now the network that drives more traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined has made some major changes to their platform that impact brands in a positive way.

The new Pinterest features, which appear when users switch their profiles to the new design, come after extensive consumer feedback and testing. These changes bring several opportunities for brands to enhance their strategies, increase their reach, and measure their overall social impact. Let’s take a look at some of the big features and what they mean for your brand.

Larger Pin Images

What consumers will notice instantly with the new look is the increased graphic size for pins — now a whopping 735 pixels wide, up from the previous 600 pixels. Brands will want to focus on this change when creating images for website content. While the increase in width will display horizontal images larger, vertical images with the 735 width could be limited in terms of visibility when the length is scaled up to compensate.

Enhanced Discovery Features

The new look also brings enhanced discovery features that are revealed when a pin is enlarged as it now shows pins from the same board, pins from the same source, and people who pinned this also pinned. You’ll also notice a website button that will take viewers straight to the source of the pin on your website. These improvements provide more opportunities for consumers to find and interact with a brand’s website content and boards.

Consider reevaluating your Pinterest strategy to narrowly focus board content for improved recommendations. For example, rather than creating a “Home Improvement” board, create a variety of boards that cover specific topics that a consumer would be interested in, such as “Kitchen Remodeling” or “Wall Painting” to improve engagement.

new pinterest features

Emphasis on Website Links

While hashtags are rumored to be coming to fellow social network Facebook, Pinterest has taken the opposite approach by removing the symbol’s searchability and linkability throughout the site. Additional links pasted into the comments of pins will no longer work as well, driving traffic only to the main source of the pin. These changes emphasize the need for brands to continue to use keywords and commonly searched terms in descriptions and board titles.

Consider looking at your Google Analytics to see what keywords are being searched online for your site and try to incorporate those keywords into your titles or descriptions.

Web Analytics Capabilities

In addition to usability updates, Pinterest introduced web analytics to give site owners insight into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites. In order to begin tracking analytics, brands will need to verify their website from their business account after switching to the new look. Once you have a verified website, analytics will begin to track how many people have pinned from your site, how many people have seen these pins, and how many people visited your site from Pinterest.

Using these analytics will not only be beneficial in terms of seeing top content for engagement, they’ll also allow for more information gathering through analysis and testing. Consider running campaigns by changing descriptions on pins, or by pinning the same content on different boards to see which one refers more traffic.

Better Features, Better Pins, Better Results

“We think that these tools will help website owners understand what’s working for them and what’s not so that they can create even better pins in the future,” said Tao Tao, a software engineer at Pinterest. We couldn’t agree more. The changes to the platform provide greater potential for brands looking to generate leads and gain customers using this highly engaging site.

What do you think of these new Pinterest features? Will they move the needle for your brand? Still stuck in neutral with your Pinterest strategy? Check out our nine pinning strategies to help you get moving.

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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.