Two-thirds of the content that people post to Pinterest are originally from businesses, like product images from a retailer's site. But it hasn't been that easy for brands themselves to post that content, let alone pay to promote those organic posts as ads on Pinterest. Pinterest is now trying to make both efforts easier.
The company has created a program for Pinterest-sanctioned marketing technology companies to offer tools for marketers to manage their Pinterest accounts.
These tools would enable brands to schedule when pins should publish, for example, or secure internal approvals to publish pins without a mess of emails and phone calls. They could also monitor the best times of day for a brand to pin something. Another likely tool, incorporating Pinterest into social publishing dashboards that also plug into other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, would let a brand sync its posts across all of its social accounts.
The first social publishing tool providers to join Pinterest's Marketing Developer Partners program are Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, NewsCred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Tailwind.
Pinterest has been testing the program over the last few months and seen that pins posted through its partners' tools have received stronger-than-average repin rates, according to Jyri Kidwell, Pinterest's head of marketing developer partnership.
More marketers publishing more pins means more opportunities for Pinterest to make money by getting those marketers to pay to promote their pins across the social network. Pinterest is also starting to test a way for advertisers in the U.S. to buy ads on Pinterest through the same type of third-party ad-buying dashboards that they may already use to turn their organic Facebook and Twitter posts into ads.
"The goal is to help businesses have tools where they can scale, optimize and manage their content on Pinterest, whether it's organic or paid," Mr. Kidwell said. "But a likely scenario is that they'll promote things that are getting good engagement, organic to paid."
