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
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