The two biggest “Yeah it’s cool but how will they ever monetise THAT” platforms have recently made their moves and shown exactly how they’re going to make dollar out of cool pictures.
Where every girl goes to daydream about her rustic lakeside wedding, complete with tweed waistcoated page boys and live doves carrying the artisan cruelty-free hammered rose gold rings. When Pinterest first arrived, I was hooked.
I spent many hours writing about how it was more than just a lady playground and you should totally be doing it because it looks nice and gets spread around the globe…blah blah blah. But now I can actually put my money where my mouth is.
Buyable Pins
Pinterest announced a few days ago that it will be releasing Buyable Pins, a new click-to-buy button on posts. There will also be swipe functionality, letting customers browse product options.
The Buyable Pin doesn’t cost money unless you want to set up one to promote – it’s something that Pinterest works out for itself when someone Pins from your site.
Not only will the world be tempted by your glorious products and pin them to their followers; they’ll also be able to BUY ON IMPULSE. That magical brain process that turns like into love into I need it now because I have that dress for Kayleigh’s birthday that would go perfectly in 30 seconds.
I buy things like I rip off plasters: super-fast to minimise second thoughts and painful feelings. Click-to-buy is the way forward.
The last few months have seen more sponsored posts appearing in Instagram users’ feeds. Airlines tempting me with beautiful vistas in far-flung locales – ugh.
Slider posts
But then last week I noticed something new: where lame old non-paid posts are stuck at single frame (unless it’s a video clip), the new sponsored posts have swipe functionality.
Multiple posts in one!
I even swiped, cursing my human curiosity and need for visual stimulation as I validated the company’s marketing spend.
The first one I spotted was by Thomson Holidays, which used very typical Instagram-style photos to blend well with the advertee’s feed. Cocktail, beach, bikini-clad lady swimming under water… Much jealous, many envy.
It’s obvious in retrospect.
Facebook has had these multi-frame ads for yonks and the Instagram/Facey relationship has seen lots of other inter-platform copies – like silencing auto-playing videos, which started on Instagram and travelled quickly to Facebook.
Instagram has also just updated the look of its desktop site so now’s a perfect time to make your business look good online.
Links
Another step away from traditional Instagram posts is the Learn more button. One of Instagram’s real drawbacks for me is that you can’t link in a post – you put up a picture of your latest product but you can’t send people to look at (buy) it. Gah!
But now people willing to put their hand in their pocket can put a clicky button underneath their post to link out to an external site. Super-cool.
If you’re not sure if image sharing networks are for you, check out these cool ideas for how to market on Instagram. It’s often very cheap and very easy. And who doesn’t like that?
NOOOOOOOO!! don’t get sucked in to the trap of consumerism it’s just another way of them (companies,Buisnesses,organisations especially big corporate companies like these) yet again drawing people in to spend uneccessarily keeping people poorer instead of more prosperous financilly SAVE SAVE AND SAVE some more thats the key to increasing your finances and budgeting, really understanding the language of money, how it works, and how to increase it whilst keeping your cost lower.
We are already spending money we don’t need to spend on pointless things, gymics and tricks of the media and marketers pulling people in with false advertising lets get smarter and STAY SMARTER. I won’t be giving them a penny there are many other ways to market your buisness you can have a facebook page for free! and market you can post a link to your buisness blog for free!! and market till your hearts content you can post you buisness blog link on all these socil networking sites also, so why pay for what you can do for free!! thereare public domain sites with tons of nice pictures. #waste of money #more consumersim tricks #greed in abundance on their part #NO WAY AND NO THANKS.
Hi Becca. I agree: you can do so much of social for free, especially as a small business. It’s good to keep up to date with these things though because you never know when you’ll have a product you really want to push.
It is getting harder to be seen on social, especially Facebook, so some people might see that as a budget priority if social is a big part of their business. A lot of small businesses (especially makeup and clothing) have built everything on Instagram, so they’re the kind of SMEs I’d see going for this kind of promotion. I wouldn’t be tempted by the ads myself just yet – I’m just watching the bigger brands do their thing before I pass judgement.
Click to buy has some serious possibilities though…
Thanks for your comment!