One of Pinterest’s interesting features is its secret board. Users had up to six secret boards – until now. Users of the social bookmarking site and visual discovery tool can make the most of the recently announced unlimited options in secret boards. Pinterest attributed its latest decision to the increasing prevalence among users to use secret boards, alongside public boards.
After Facebook bought Face.com and Yahoo’s purchase of LookFlow, Pinterest has snapped up VisualGraph, a start-up that develops image recognition, machine vision and visual search technologies. This latest acquisition by the pinboard-style photo-sharing website is an indication of the increasing demand for visual search solutions for better discovery and ad-targeting.
The Pew Research Center has found that social media continues to be a part of U.S adults’ daily lives. A whopping 73% spends time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. More people – 42% to be exact – are on multiple networks, a development driven by the proliferation of mobile apps and content marketing.
Pinterest has now made it easy for users to find pins they might like so they can cut down on the time spent on discovery. The new feature is called ‘related pins’ and as the name implies, recommends a selection of pins to users’ home feed. This appears to be a handy feature as it not only saves time but also introduces you to pins related to your interest/liking that you may otherwise miss.
That 75% of all online content is shared on Twitter and Facebook may not come as a big surprise to anyone. But here’s the big news: two well-known players are making rapid inroads into the content-sharing space. LinkedIn and Pinterest have reported robust sharing numbers; the world’s largest professional sharing network saw its content sharing rise by over 19% while the photo-sharing website posted a 15% growth in sharing. Facebook moved at a relatively slow pace, recording a growth of just under 15% while Twitter declined 8%.
One of the most popular features on Twitter – the hashtag, is now on Facebook. Although Facebook and Twitter are bitter rivals, it hasn’t stopped Facebook from capitalizing on the popularity of the hashtag. Facebook is not the only website to adopt the hashtag. A few months back, popular image sharing website – Pinterest, made the hashtag official on its website. Now Pinterest users can use hashtags to categorize and optimize their pins or images better on the website. Hashtags also allow people to find images much more efficiently on Pinterest.
Images are far more interesting than plain textual content and are instantly eye-catching. Even companies that don’t necessarily need to depend on images should use high-quality images on their websites to make their websites much more appealing to customers. The appeal of images can be seen by the fact that Pinterest and Instagram are some of the most popular social networking sites on the planet. These websites only allow users to share images, but smart businesses have been able to use them to promote their products and brands.
Pinterest has now made the mobile application version of their website as feature-packed as the desktop version. Pinterest has announced that the latest versions of their mobile apps – Android 1.5 and iOS 2.4 will have numerous new features to make it easier for users to interact with others and to find pins. Some of the new features:
Most social media marketers and companies stick to Facebook and Twitter for all their social media and content marketing campaigns. In this global economy where valuable customers and leads need to be found from all countries to expand companies, these social media channels are not enough. With over a billion active users and because it is the top social networking platform in many countries, Facebook is the safe choice but there are many other social networks that you have probably never heard of that are more popular than Facebook in quite a few countries.
The believe it or not list on recent social media trends – do tell us what you think and what are your predictions on what’s to come on the social media scene.
As a social media marketer, you must have your hands full with Facebook and Twitter marketing. This does not mean that you can ignore the rising star in the social media landscape – Pinterest. Granted that it is a photo sharing website that had a lukewarm response when it was launched – but now this photo-sharing platform has more than 20 million users – most of whom are very active. Pinterest is now one of the biggest social networking platforms – at par with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and is also one of the biggest photo sharing applications after Instagram. In fact, a recent Nielsen report indicates that more than 20% of Pinterest users purchased a product after seeing it on Pinterest.
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.