21 Nov Pinterest Place Pins: What It Is and Who It Can Benefit
For many, the greatest joy of Pinterest is the collision of fantasy and reality, of finding tomorrow night’s supper next to a beautiful picture of Poland’s Crooked Forest. Users curate boards of practicality and of wanderlust and Pinterest continually evolves to help make these dreams more actionable offline.
Today, Pinterest rolled out the Place Pin feature as a way to make destination pins more actionable for users. The Place Pin tool, utilizing Foursquare’s API and Mapbox technology, adds maps and additional information, like addresses and phone numbers to individual pins. Pinterest users collect places and attractions on one board, curating a virtual mobile travel assistant through the Pinterest mobile app.
Ideal Industry For Putting Place Pins To Work
This tool is extremely useful for the travel industry to curate boards that revolve around specific travel or destinations. For example, a hotel business can create a board titled San Diego, pinning local restaurants, attractions, and of course, their hotels. When a Pinterest user searches for “San Diego,” the hotel’s board will appear. The user then repins the image of the hotel’s scenic pool, which now includes address and phone number. Months later when planning a trip to San Diego, the user may reference his own San Diego pins, including the hotel Place Pin. With the contact information so readily available, it speeds along the buying cycle to a faster booking.
Social Opportunity for Smaller, Local Businesses
Additionally, it would be useful to open the Pinterest boards for contributions, letting local businesses add their own Place Pins. Not only would this increase compelling content, but it creates an avenue for small businesses to compete on social media platforms with corporate powerhouses.
Goodberry’s in Raleigh probably cannot purchase a trend on Twitter against Ben & Jerry’s, but while Place Pins translate poorly for buying ice cream in a grocery store, they can mean an increase in revenue for the ice cream parlor that touts the best mint chocolate chip in North Carolina.
Just like Rich Pins and Promoted Pins, Pinterest Place Pins offer brands a unique opportunity to capitlize on the Pinterest experience.
