This Week in Social Media... Pinterest makes Promoted Pins available, LinkedIn expands Publisher platform, and Pinterest creates Pinstitute

Juan Valle

Jan 12 2015

In this edition of “This Week in Social Media,” Pinterest makes Promoted Pins available to everyone, LinkedIn expands the Publisher feature, and Pinterest creates Pinstitute.

Promoted Pins Now Available to Everyone

At the beginning of the month, Pinterest officially rolled out Promoted Pins to everyone! Eight months ago, Pinterest launched Promoted Pins for a select few brands to test the new feature. After analyzing the data obtained from the campaigns, the company is ready to move forward with the roll-out.

“Results have been promising,” said Joanne Bradford, Head of Partnerships with Pinterest. Additionally, this is what the Pinterest team gathered from the results:

Promoted Pins perform just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins. Brand advertisers achieved about a 30% bump in earned media (free impressions!) from their campaigns. That’s from people who saw a Promoted Pin and thought it was good enough to save to one of their own boards.
Promoted Pins perform long after a campaign ends. Since Pins are evergreen and last forever, we often saw an extra 5% bump in earned media in the month following the end of a campaign.
Brands both in and out of our core categories found success. From financial services to food to auto, brands from a wide array of industries saw results.
Auction-based Promoted Pins (CPC) are seeing success, too. Many of our self-serve beta partners are seeing major gains in traffic and impressions. We’re still making tweaks to the product and want to make sure we get it just right before we roll it out to all businesses.

LinkedIn Expands Publishing

Early last year LinkedIn introduced Publish, a feature for users to publish long-form posts about their expertise and interests, to every member of the social network in the United States. A milestone was reached for the company as the one millionth post was recently published.

The plan is to expand the feature according to Akshay Kothari, Product Manager at LinkedIn, as he stated, “We want each one of our more than 330 million members to be able to share their insights with other professionals across the globe.” Last week the company moved forward with the plan to expand as the ability to publish on LinkedIn is now available to all members in English-speaking countries.

That now encompasses more than 230 million people around the globe who can now tell their stories, show their expertise, and share their stories. Have you written yet? Click the pencil in your status bar and give it a try.

Pinterest Announces Pinstitute

As Pinterest continues to grow, they committed to making the social network more business-friendly. “We’re committed to making Pinterest the best place for you to inspire your customers and see measurable results from your marketing,” stated Joanne Bradford, Head of Partnerships at Pinterest. To education business users, the company rolled out Pinstitute.

Pintitute is a new program for businesses to learn how to connect with Pinners and see a return from Pinterest. Pinstitute will focus on two particular areas, creative, and measurement. As of now Pinterest has invited a select group of companies to attend the quarterly Pinstitute workshops- the first is scheduled for March. For small businesses, they are planning a series of webinars and additional online learning tools.

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