New Features on Pinterest You Should Know About

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Pinterest has been busy!

Reaching 70 million users and 2.5 billion monthly pageviews, Pinterest has been growing like a weed – a very popular weed that marketing professionals should not ignore.

We all know why I love Pinterest, especially for nonprofits. My top 3 reasons:

1)     Pinterest is growing leaps and bounds.

2)     Pinterest is where women are, and women tend to give more to charity on average.

3)     Pinterest is aspirational, not of-the-moment. It’s a place where we catalog our dreams, what inspires us and what moves us – and we save these images and look at them more than once.

This week I want to focus on some of the brand new features rolled out by Pinterest in the past few weeks.

With all the new changes, what’s the most important to know about and to understand?

1)     Pinterest wants to be more useful to brands and businesses.

If your nonprofit doesn’t have a business page, set one up here or convert your personal page to a business page.

Rich Pins: Recently Pinterest rolled out “Rich Pins”. Granted, right now there are only three types – movies, recipes and products.

Nonprofits that sell products or have an online catalog should pay attention and apply to get them on Pinterest.

You’ll need to prep your website with meta tags and test out the pins first, then apply to get them active on Pinterest. A word to the wise, if you are not a techie person, find someone to help.

Email Alerts: Very exciting for the shopaholics among us, Pinterest announced that they are going to start sending email alerts out when a product that you’ve pinned has dropped in price. That’s right – they are going to let you know when that bag you covert or that expensive pair of shoes goes on sale!

I have a feeling that this small, useful feature will get people pinning more and will entice even more new users to the site.

2)     Pinterest realizes that a mobile revolution is upon us.

In my last blog post, I reported that in less than a year more of your supporters will visit your website from a mobile device than from their desktop computer.

Pinterest understands this, and has rolled out updated, much easier-to-use mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.

Some of the useful new features:

• Push notifications on the mobile app
• Invite people to join Group Boards from the mobile app
• Tag/mention friends in comments from the mobile app

3)     Pinterest wants users to get more social and to interact directly with friends on the site.

With its new “Send Pin” feature, you can now send pins directly to friends within the site! I love this feature because I am constantly finding this that I think my friends would like.

You don’t have to tag people in the comments anymore, or take a screen shot and text it (was I the only one doing that?)

You can now simply click on the Send button and choose another Pinterest user, from your phone or computer, you can also add a short message like “Buy me this” (just kidding).

TIP: You can only send pins to people that you follow and that follow you back, much like Direct Messages on Twitter.

4)     Pinterest wants to make searching for what you want much easier.

Admit it – when you need something, you immediately Google it (or, ask Siri).

If you don’t get a satisfactory answer to your query within seconds, you get frustrated. Such a thing was happening on Pinterest with users searching for a specific pin, even something they had pinned on a board, but couldn’t easily find it. (I have 74 boards and 3,435 pins as of this writing, so I know how that feels!)

A new feature was rolled out to let you filter your search results with a “Just my pins” option. Simple!

TIP:  Make sure your captions are accurate and include relevant key words to help for easy searching and maximum re-pinning.

Also, suggestions now appear in the search bar, to help speed things along even more.

5)     Pinterest understands that measuring the data is vital for success.

Previously pinners had to sign up for third party applications sucha s Pingraphy and Pinerly to measure their return on investment on the site.

Wisely, Pinterest has launched it’s own analytics and insights tool.

To access the new analytics, click the word Analytics in the top-right menu under your name.

If you don’t see it yet, you need to make sure to switch to the new Pinterest look and verify your website.

Things to come

Pinterest announced that they have a few exciting things in the pipeline:

• A new Edit button
• Suggestions and more personalized pin recommendationsbased on websites you visit that have the Pin It button (you can turn this feature off at anytime)

For further reading, check out The Pinterest Roadmap on TechCrunch

Which Pinterest feature are you most excited about? Which is the most useful?

photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc