Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Visual search- the next big Pinterest milestone?

Close in line in the league with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Pinterest is becoming a formidable digital advertising player. Visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text which is one of the reasons online users are using this platform to gather information they want and need. Last week the platform launched a revolutionary search feature that uses photos to comb through millions of product images. For example, someone looking at a picture of a chair can zero in on finding similar chairs by tapping on the Pin to start a search result without typing a word. Up until now, people have only been able to search on Pinterest with text queries. It took Facebook four and a half years to build the same kind of sophisticated ad tools that Pinterest is pitching at the moment and Facebook still doesn’t have the visual search feature yet.

So how does it work? If you see something you like, you can hit the little gray and white magnifying glass in the top right hand corner and can drag your mouse to put a box around the part of the image you want to learn more about. This will yield a selection of visually similar results and tags you can choose from based on what's in the photo to narrow down the search. To take it a step further, when focused on the specific item, whether it's a lamp or a chair or a dress, Pinterest will give the user the
 exact name of the brand and where it can be purchased.

For now, marketers won't be able to buy visual search ads like they've been able to with text search ads, which debuted early in 2014. Pinterest hasn't commented on whether visual search ads would be a part of its future plans or not, but looking at the evolutionary path of the platform’s future that scenario seems likely. The visual-search move should prove popular to users—which will help maintain marketers' attention for the Pinterest ad products that currently exist. By making Pinterest easier to navigate through visual search, people could use it more like a shopping site than an inspiration discovery time sink. And where there’s search, there’s room for relevant ads that hit people who already have purchase intent — which could be very lucrative for Pinterest.
This is where Pinterest poses a marketing challenge for Google for marketing dollars spent by brands. Pinterest's advertising potential is more akin to Google than social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The site's addition of Buyable Pins—which include 60 million shoppable posts—gives it a leg up over Google and possibly e-commerce platforms like Amazon. The power of the Pinterest platform is in tapping into the consumer's purchase mindset at all stages of its process from inspiration, discovery and now all the way through the purchase itself. The world is moving over to visual, pictures and video and this might just be the unique selling proposition for Pinterest for leaping ahead of the others in the crowd.


Read More: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/252665

No comments: