Pinterest launched a partnership program with a select group of 10 marketing services companies that are developing tools to help commercial pinners optimize their content on the social network.
“About two thirds of the content on Pinterest comes from brands and publishers,” says Jyri Kidwell, who heads up the new Marketing Developer Partners (MDP) program. “Brands are a natural part of Pinterest. They improve the overall content for pinners, who come to us to plan their future and discover what they want to do in life.”
The first companies to join the program and get access to Pinterest’s content publishing API are Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, Newscred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr, and Tailwind. They were chosen for their experience in directing Pinterest programs for Fortune 1000 companies.
“They’re building things like pin schedulers that tell when to publish and systems to tag content to tell what’s working and what’s not,” Kidwell says. “We’ve been live for three months with this in a beta test and published millions of pins. The program has shown stronger than average re-pin rates.”
Kidwell says that significant pin volume increases were experienced by Kraft in a test with Pinterest optimization company Ahalogy, and by Dove and Hellman’s with the planning and analysis platform Percolate.
“Pinterest has been in start-up mode for the past several years, and its rise to popularity often exceeded its ability to build relationships with interested brands. Pulling in nimble partners will help innovate within the existing space in a user-friendly way,” comments Joe Gizzi, strategy director at Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a content marketing agency. “Layering in a scheduler that suggests the best time to pin can only help brands reach audiences when they are visiting most often.”
Pinterest has been testing a new Ads API program since the beginning of the year. “It’s in limited tests with a few advertisers. We’re looking at how to gain efficiencies in buying promoted pins at scale,” says Kidwell, who joined Pinterest about a year ago from CitizenNet, a Facebook partner.
