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Pinterest Offers New Mobile Messaging Feature | DrivingSales News

Pinterest Offers New Mobile Messaging Feature

August 11, 2014 0 Comments

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Pinterest has announced a new feature that allows users to chat about particular Pins, or anything else of interest, in the company’s attempt to break into the mobile messaging sphere.

Pinterest is trying to encourage broader interactions, making it possible for users to send Pins (the visual bookmarks that users amass on their “boards”) and messages to multiple people simultaneously.

Tom Watson, a Pinterest product designer, explained the company’s intention in a recent blog post. “Every day, people send more than two million Pins. Sending a Pin is a great way to let someone know you found something they’d love. We wanted to make it easier for you to have a good old-fashioned conversation about those Pins. So now, when someone shoots you a Pin, you’ll be able to reply with a message or send a Pin back,” he wrote.

As Pinterest has already established itself as one of the more popular sites on the Web, this move seems like a logical next step. According to eMarketer, approximately 40 million people are expected to visit Pinterest at least once per month this year, which is up almost 16% from the previous year. Pinterest has approximately 750 million boards on its platform, with 30 billion pins about travelers, foodies and more, establishing the popular website as a cross between a social network and a visual search engine.

Mobile usage has exploded in recent years, making messaging a key component of the competition between social networks. This fact was made crystal clear last year when Snapchat rebuffed a $3 billion buyout bid from Facebook. Since that time, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion and has launched its own ephemeral messaging app called Slingshot. While Snapchat remains the most popular disappearing messaging service, competition from other players has increased, including Whisper, Secret, PostSecret, sixbillionsecrets and Facebook’s Slingshot.

Despite Pinterest’s aggressive monetization efforts, such as adding a self-service component to its Promoted Pins ad product, the company recently decided to take another $200 million in capital at a valuation of $5 billion. The company has used a significant share of capital on acquisitions, including the recent purchase of Icebergs, a Barcelona-based startup that specializes in content-organizing and sharing tools. Other Pinterest acquisitions include culinary community Punchfork, review aggregator app Livestar, coding competition site Hackermeter, and image recognition and visual search startup Visual Graph.

The company is focused on international growth as well as additional monetization strategies. Pinterest is now available in 31 countries around the world, with international users representing approximately 30% of its total audience.

Tom Watson’s recent blog post ended with the following suggestion about an effective use of Pinterest’s new functionality. “Say you’re organizing a camping trip with friends – try sending Pins to the whole gang so you can figure out where to go and what meals to make. If you need a reminder of who’s bringing what, just pull up the conversation right from your notifications,” wrote Watson. “We hope this will help you plan projects, swap creative ideas and share your best discoveries with each other.”

About the Author:

The DrivingSales News team is dedicated to breaking the relevant and the tough stories affecting car dealers. Have questions for DrivingSales News? Reach the team at news@drivingsales.com.

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