Pinterest announced over the weekend that they are launching a “crazy fun visual search tool” this week.
The new tool will be available on both phone apps and the Pinterest website and it will allow users to zoom into a picture if there is something they see that they like within it. The visual search tool will the attempt to identify what it is and provide search results to other pins that are visually similar to that item.
How Does it Work?
If you see something you like inside a pin you will need to tap the search tool in the top right hand corner of the pin, highlight the section of the pin that interests you and from there visually similar pins will be displayed.
Why should you care?
This is especially relevant for retailers. As you can see from the graph below from Google trends NZ interest in the Pinterest website has been on a meteoric rise for some time and can be a powerful tool in promoting retail and destination products.
Another good example of this coming into summer could be someone following architecture or landscape design on Pinterest sees an exterior photo of an outside area with a deck and swimming pool with very cool bean bags. They may not be in the market for a new swimming pool or deck but love the look of the bean bags so they highlight them and search for those bean bags in Pinterest. A retailer with images (pins) of those bean bags could very well be shown in the search results and pick up the sale.
If you have a heavy retail focus and don’t have a Pinterest account it may be time to consider it. If you do think about creating pins for individual product listings.
NB: At the time of writing (10th of Nov) the functionality has not been enabled in the NZ market however it will no doubt be here soon.
Update – We can confirm that as of the 16th of November the visual search tool has been rolled out to NZ users.
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Glenn is a Partner and Senior Consultant who has had a very successful career building growth companies in the private equity arena. He has a wealth of experience in both the digital space and strategy development. Prior to becoming a partner in SureFire Glenn built one of the largest digital teams in New Zealand for a NASDAQ listed global online marketing company & Google's largest premium partner.
