Pinterest’s future depends on deeper targeting

But there’s another fast-growing platform brands should consider – Pinterest. With its simple and visual-driven interface, the platform has grown its active users by 111 per cent in the past six months.

With all that growth, brands naturally want to be part of Pinterest, to reach those who use the platform as a mirror that reflects their aesthetic sensibilities and interests as they evolve. Pinterest is experimenting with products that help marketers tap into its audience, while racing against other social platforms, including the Facebook-owned Instagram. 2015 will be the year to see if Pinterest can develop into a must-have for brand marketers.

The future of advertising on Pinterest

For its part, Instagram has already begun selling ads directly within users’ streams, mimicking the same photo content that users post on the platform. Pinterest has been slower in rolling out ad products, beginning with its self-serve promoted pins. Still relatively narrow in capabilities compared with other social ad products, and not available to all advertisers just yet, promoted pins offer a limited advertising solution, with room for development. Retailers have been the primary users, placing ads in relevant searches with some degree of targeting.

Deeper targeting will make Pinterest a big player and potentially catapult the platform onto the same stage as Twitter and Facebook. Those two platforms offer a great deal of value in terms of both scale and data. Pinterest’s growth shows it can deliver the former, but the latter is still in question as advertisers wait for a robust API that opens up targeting and ad management possibilities. Currently, advertisers have access to category targeting (search), home-feed targeting, as well as targeting by gender, location, language and device.

Read the rest of this story at AdAge.

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