Pinterest: Pins with a price tag?

Pinterest recently announced planned changes to its Promoted Pins in the U.S., with the hope of making its advertising more tailored to each user.

The site also plans to provide higher quality feedback to advertisers about the impact of their Promoted Pins.

Much like fellow image-based social media site Instagram, which announced it would bring sponsored posts to the UK in September (with access to real-time performance ad data for advertisers to boot), Pinterest has defended the decision to advertise, reminding us that it is a necessary move in order to keep the site up and running for years to come. Both sites have also stressed the strict visual regulations of these promotional posts, which must be met by brands in order to retain aesthetic quality and creativity on both sites.

But what does this mean for brands? U.S. businesses can now join the waiting list for Promoted Pins, with Pinterest promising those interested that sponsored posts will be pay-per-click. Even if businesses are not looking to advertise with Pinterest or Instagram at this stage, the sites’ respective decisions to adopt advertising when twinned with the knowledge that both are fast catching up with leading social media sites, (it was thought two years ago that Pinterest was retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3 times as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history, and the site’s popularity  has only heightened since) might make us take these sites much more seriously as a marketing tool.

Many brands worldwide are already using visual social media sites to market their goods and services, as consumers become increasingly responsive to visual content. It will be interesting to examine this responsiveness in a more quantifiable sense now that both Instagram and Pinterest have embraced the sponsored post, and see how the story unfolds for businesses across the World.

Sources: Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look,  Pinterest’s new Privacy Policy preview.