Just when Twitter users were dealing with the news that Instagram was pulling out, Pinterest’s recent announcement is bound to bring some cheer. Instagram users may not be able to share their images on Twitter again but they can start using Pinterest instead. The pinboard-based photo sharing service recently added support for Twitter cards. This will allow people to see Pinterest images in the Twitter feed itself. They will not have to leave Twitter and follow the link to Pinterest to view the images.
This change was first noticed this month and Pinterest officials have confirmed that the photo-sharing service is testing the Twitter card support feature. They have even claimed that testing started a week before Instagram decided to pull out, indicating that the decision to add Twitter card support was in no way influenced by Instagram’s actions. Now users can expand tweets with Pinterest links and view the images in the tweet and even follow the particular user on Pinterest from Twitter. The name of the board and the description of the pins are also available in the Twitter cards.
Pinterest has become immensely popular and now has more than 11 million unique viewers and it achieved this number in record time. The company also raised $100 million in May, 2012 from a Japanese investor and is now valued at a whopping $1.5 billion. It has even surpassed Google+ and Tumblr in terms of usage. To put things into perspective, views from desktops for Pinterest grew by 1047% and from mobile devices rose by 4225% in a period of one year. So this new support for Twitter cards could only be a win-win situation for both companies.
Experts agree that adding Twitter card support will definitely help Pinterest even further just like it did with Instagram. Tweeters who love pinning can now combine their two favorite social networks seamlessly and tweeters who are uninitiated to Pinterest can see all the wonders of Pinterest without leaving the micro-blogging platform.