There is no doubt, that we’ve all heard of Pinterest. Even more, at one point we’ve probably all used it. Whether it be looking for some design inspiration, a healthy dinner recipe or simply looking for a new pair of shoes.
Pinterest is the perfect platform for growing customer awareness and direct sales. It’s like this big visual search engine where the audience can get lost for hours. This creates a huge opportunity for both consumer-focused and business-to-business companies. And with the proper approach, you can use this to your advantage.
Just like any other platform, Pinterest too uses its own terminology.
Here’s a little glossary, with the help of which I will try to clarify some of the terms, that might seem a bit odd to an outsider.
- Pin – pin is an idea on Pinterest to inspire you; when you click on a pin it links back to a website.
- Pinnable – content that is worth saving to Pinterest, sometimes referenced when best practices are involved, sometimes pinnable is subjective.
- Pinner – Pinterest user.
- Save – the act of creating a Pin, this is referenced when content is saved directly from a website URL or from inside Pinterest on an existing Pin.
- Repin – a pin that is created from existing Pinterest content, not the Pin URL source.
- Boards – the place Pins are saved. Boards are a group or cluster of related Pins. Boards are usually topical and reflect the tastes and interests of the Pinner.
- Group Boards – boards where multiple people are contributors and save Pins
- Rich Pins – Pins with extra information (metadata) right on the Pin. There are four types of rich Pins: Article, Recipe, Product, and App Rich Pins.
- Promoted Pins – these Pins are ads that businesses pay to be displayed on Pinterest.
- Pinterest Tag – a feature that allows you to track what people do on your website, once they see or click on your Pinterest ads. With gathered info, you can measure your ad success or improve audience targeting.
- Enhanced Match – helps you more accurately match conversions on your site back to Pinterest users. It’s especially useful when a cookie isn’t present and uses a privacy-safe email parameter.
- Pinterest Tag Helper – a Google Chrome extension that helps you ensure that your Tag is properly set up. The extension verifies that both the Pinterest Tag and Enhanced Match are receiving the correct data and passing that information back to Pinterest so that you can more accurately report on your results.
- Pinterest Actalike Audience – think “lookalike”. Like on other platforms, Actalike audiences are found by identifying people who are similar to your existing audience(s). Pinterest finds new people for you to target by using data and behavioral info about people on Pinterest (similar searches, content views, repins, saves, etc.).
We hope these terms will help you better understand the awesome advertising platform that is Pinterest. Sure, Facebook is still king, but Facebook and Instagram users aren’t really looking to buy anything. They’re mostly just killing time or catching up to what their friends are up to. Pinterest users, on the other hand, browse with a consumer-oriented mindset, which makes them much more likely to purchase. Plus Pinterest users are more experimental with their purchases. This lets them consider promising new businesses and buy their products. We could go on and on…