Ahead of a potential IPO later in the year, Pinterest is ramping up its eCommerce tools, this time through the addition of new product catalogs and personalized shopping recommendations, in order to maximize business potential.
First, in addition to the ‘More like this’ option beneath each Pin, which uncovers visually similar items, Pinterest is also adding a ‘More from [brand]’ option, which will showcase a broader range of product Pins from the same business.
As you can see in the above example, when you scroll down from a Pin, there’ll be a new option, where available, to also tap on the ‘More from [brand]’ list, which will showcase similar items, but confined to that provider. That’ll definitely prove popular with brands – at present, the ‘More like this…’ option can take users away from their offerings, even if they might have similar product in their catalog that would fit the bill. This option will enable businesses to keep users around for longer, and help facilitate brand loyalty on the platform.
Next up, Pinterest is also adding in new personalized shopping recommendations:
“Alongside style, home, beauty and DIY boards, you’ll see in-stock ideas related to what you’ve been saving, to match your style. Just click “more ideas” then the shopping tag to start shopping ideas picked for you. Tap + to quickly add the Pin to your board, or click the Pin to go straight to checkout on the retailer’s site.”
The addition will provide more ways for Pinners to find available products similar to what they’re interested in, with direct buying options, making it easier to get more shopping ideas.
Pinterest will also now enable brands to upload their full catalog to the platform, and turn their products into dynamic Product Pins. This compliments the platform’s recent announcement of automated ‘Shop the Look’ Pins, which are able to identify products within Pins and connect them to buying options. Uploading your product catalog will ensure your products show up for more of these automated recommendations, boosting your business potential on the platform.
In addition to this, Pinterest is also making its Shopping Ads available to all businesses through its self-serve ad tool, and it’s expanding its ‘Shopping search’, in order to showcase more products to buy for related on-platform queries.
As noted, the updates expand Pinterest’s eCommerce potential, adding in more ways for users to find, and buy, relevant items, related to their search history, their interests and specific brands. That will make the platform more inviting for businesses – already, research has shown that Pinterest drives far higher purchase intent than other platforms, with some 90% of Pinnersusing the platform to plan for or make purchases.
Pinterest may have relatively fewer users (250 million) than other social platforms – but Pinterest has repeatedly stated that its, in fact, not a social network. It’s become a ‘discovery engine’, ‘a catalog of ideas’, and in that sense, Pinterest, in many ways, is in a league of its own – a sort of middle ground between Google search and Amazon product listings, but more driven by your personal preferences and interests.
It’s taken a while, but Facebook is now rolling out its promised ‘time spent’ dashboard within its main app, enabling users to track the time they’re active on Facebook each day, and set prompts to limit their use.
As you can see from the above screenshots, the new dashboard is available within the functions listing, and through it, you can see your total time spent, set daily reminders, and change your settings to make better use of your time.
The options are very similar to what Instagram launched last week, which are part of the broader ‘digital wellbeing’ push within tech circles that’s been initiated in response to a range of reports about the potential negatives of overuse of digital platforms.
Facebook itself commissioned a report which found that passive engagement on social can lead to negative mental health impacts. That finding puts Facebook, as a business, in a tough position – on one hand, it needs to make you come back to the platform and use it as much as possible to boost its usage stats (and attract more ad dollars), but on the other, there are user welfare concerns with the same.
In this respect, Facebook’s new tracking tools seem somewhat like a red flag being waved by a matador – yes, they seek to address the core issue, but not really.
As noted by Techcrunch:
“Facebook and Instagram’s versions are particularly toothless. There are no options to force you to ease off your usage, just a quick daily limit notification to dismiss. iOS 12’s Screen Time at least delivery’s a weekly usage report by default so the feature finds you even if you don’t go looking for it. And Android’s new Digital Wellbeing dashboard is by far the most powerful, graying out app icons and requiring you to dig into your settings to unlock apps once you hit your daily limit.”
Really, the apps themselves are not responsible for how you use your time – if you choose to spend your free hours mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, that’s up to you. The providers can give you access to tools to highlight the potential problems with this, but they can’t necessarily enforce any ‘rules’ around use. It is possible that they could do more, as TechCrunch notes, and Facebook could also provide more insight into how, specifically, you’re spending your time in its apps, which may help to guide your usage. But the tracking dashboards are, looking at the other side of the argument, at least a first step.
So long as people go looking for them. Will you check out your Facebook usage stats?
I’m willing to bet the majority of users of both apps won’t bother – because who wants to know how much time you’ve wasted? Who wants to be shown the hours they could have spent doing something more productive? Hence, the red flag analogy – yes, Facebook is providing tools to help, but really, they’re somewhat meaningless in the broader scheme. You’ll keep on using Facebook and Instagram the same way regardless.
That’s not to denigrate Facebook for making the effort – and who knows, maybe they will prove beneficial, and will limit our time spent, and the negative impacts. But I wouldn’t count on it.
As you’re no doubt aware, Facebook Stories aren’t as popular as Instagram Stories, the most successful version of the format which Facebook copied from Snapchat (at least in western markets). But, even so, Facebook itself remains convinced that Stories is the format of the future, including on their main platform.
At their F8 developer conference earlier this year, several Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, noted that the Stories format is on track to overtake the News Feed as the most popular social sharing option, and that that will happen sometime this year.
Given that Instagram Stories is now at 400 million users, and WhatsApp ‘Status’ is up to 450 million, the growth of the option is clearly evident – but Facebook Stories, at 150 million daily actives, is still lagging behind.
But that slower rate of growth doesn’t appear to have dampened any enthusiasm for the potential of Facebook Stories in Menlo Park, with The Social Network releasing a new blog post promoting the potential of the format for businesses.
As noted by Facebook:
“The rise of stories is clear: people want fast, immersive and fun ways to share photos, videos and text with their friends and family – and stories offer just that. People use stories to share and discover content they’re interested in for movements as big as Pride and moments as small as the coffee they’re drinking. We designed stories on our platforms to fulfill people’s need to interact and share in engaging and playful ways on the vertical screen.”
I did laugh a little at the ‘we designed’ note – though probably not as funny to those at Snap Inc.
In the post, Facebook outlines the potential of Stories for brands, and their capacity to help marketers connect with their audiences, noting that a third of the most viewed stories on Instagram are from businesses.
But ads in Stories are where Facebook suggests there’s the most brand potential.
“Businesses are already seeing results using ads in Instagram Stories. For example, Tropicana ran video ads in Instagram Stories for its summertime product promotion campaign, achieving an 18-point lift in ad recall and 15-point lift in purchase intent among males. OpenTable used ads in Instagram Stories to drive online restaurant reservations, resulting in a 33% lower cost per reservation compared to other ad formats. And Overstock ran video ads in Instagram Stories to acquire new customers and increase sales, and generated an 18% higher return on ad spend and a 20% decrease in cost per acquisition.”
Right now, however, you can’t run ads on Facebo
