Pinterest: The forgotten influencer marketing platform?

Creating an influencer marketplace, connecting brands to the right kind of influencers can be a make or break task for social media platforms.

Throwing their hats into the ring are Pinterest. Last month Pinterest launched, the “Pin Collective”- a group of expert Pinterest creators. The aim of this new branch is to connect brands with the top content creators on Pinterest.

This adds to last year’s offering where Pinterest created the “Pin Factory” an in-house studio which helps brands source influencers, scope out concepts and create ads on the platform. Over the past year it has been reported that over 600 brands have utilised the Factory. This combined with the Pin Collective outlines that for Pinterest, influencer marketing will be key to their offering over the next couple of years and creating a marketplace that works for both influencer and brand is key.

As well as this, on Pinterest, unlike many other social media platforms, there is no minimum ad budget required. With this Pinterest is aiming to encourage marketers to pick it as the platform to experiment it’s influencer marketing activities on. This combined with the fact that unlike many inbound platforms (Instagram, SnapChat) Pinterest also allows outbound links and direct traffic, means that it’s offering will increasingly look very appealing to marketers.

This year, 59% of marketers increased their influencer marketing budget and demand for the art is only set to increase in 2017. By creating all these tools Pinterest is prioritising marketeers by giving them the ability to easily experiment and find the right type of influencers for them. That said, whether Pinterest becomes the go-to destination for influencer marketing is yet to be decided.