Social Media Personalization - Pinterest

This is the 4th post in a blog series that uncovers how the major social media platforms are personalized to their end users. This post focuses on Pinterest and the platform’s work to personalize the experience for each Pinterest user.

Pinterest has been more transparent than other platforms about its efforts to personalize its service, so perhaps the fact that Pinterest personalized to you isn’t new news, but in this post I’m going to outline:

what data elements Pinterest uses to understand what pins you might like
outline some of the brains behind Pinterest’s machine learning algorithm, and
highlight tactics to think about when creating your Pinterest marketing strategy.

With Pinterest driving more traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube — combined, it’s a social media network that shouldn’t be ignored, so let’s dig in!

Here are the elements of your data that Pinterest uses to personalize the experience to you:

Profile information (gender, location)
Device information
Pinning/following activity and unfollowing
Connections
Visiting websites/using the pin it button on other sites
Data from your Facebook, Twitter, or other accounts linked to Pinterest

Much of this is covered in Pinterest’s blog post where they also offer options for users to opt out of this personalization. Or you can tinker with the personalization settings:

But who at Pinterest is driving this personalization?

Here’s more about the team at Pinterest who is working on improving their machine learning algorithm that drives their personalization:

John Rauser, a data scientist at Pinterest, highlights how user data is integrated back into their algorithm:

When people make a pinboard, they’re telling us important information about how they view the relationships between those concepts — every new pin gives us new information. Pinterest will only succeed as a business if we can leverage that information to make the service better with every new pin.

Pinterest also uses its machine learning team to spot and eliminate spam (and spammers) from the platform.

Additionally, in January of this year, the social media site bought the company, Visual Graph which focused on identifying elements in images and then connecting those images with one another, so users can stumble across the images they might find interesting.

This also which also means that Pinterest now has two additional machine learning experts on it’s team. VisualGraph’s CEO Kevin Jing helped build Google’s first machine vision application to improve the company’s image search and its employee David Liu has also worked at Google, Facebook, and Palantir and has a data science background.

Here’s how you should create a plan to break through the Pinterest personalization filter:

Now that you’re convinced that you need to up your marketing strategy to be found on Pinterest with all of this personalization, let’s outline a few elements that will enhance your ability to break through Pinterest’s personalization filter:

Put the Pin It button on your site.
Connect your Pinterest account with your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Focus on your user personas and the items they pin
Create your boards and pins around that data – content and keywords that resonate for your target audience
Timing/Scheduling (70% of Pinterest users see your pin in the first 2 days)
Engage with your board followers and with content on Pinterest, tag other pinners, etc.
Encourage click through to your page/website by making your pins engaging, and ensure that they have a call to action so that those users repeatedly engage with your site.
Make sure that your site is set up to share Rich Pins.
Measure how your Pinterest activities are delivering on your overall online ROI via Google Analytics referral data and Pinterest specific analytic tools.

Remember, this personalization means that not all of your board followers will see your pins. So keep that in mind when looking at your overall success metrics for your Pinterest activities.

Curious to learn more about social media personalization? Then stay tuned for the next blog post in this series where we look at how Facebook personalizes to you and what marketers can do to break through that network’s personalization filter.

Comments

One response to “Social Media Personalization – Pinterest”

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October 14, 2016

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