2018 in review: Pinterest

It’s been a busy old year for Pinterest. They’ve celebrated hitting 250m users a month, as well as over 175bn Pins. But what has the platform been up to?

While it used to be known as the platform for food, fashion and wedding planning, Pinterest has grown – but still retains the original idea of planning ahead. Research found that 93% of Pinners use the platform to plan a purchase, while 67% have discovered a new brand of product from business content on Pinterest.

Here are some of the biggest changes on Pinterest in 2018:

Ad updates

This year saw some big updates to Pinterest’s ad platform, as they took a step further into the world of business.

The biggest of these changes was in October, when the platform rolled out a host of updates to its self-service ads manager tool, including the ability to create new Pins through the ads manager, as well as being able to select multiple Pins at the same time.

Further advertising updates this year saw the introduction of promoted carousel ads, shoppable pins and larger width video ads that take up two thirds of a mobile screen (tying into the increase of vertical video format).

Improved mobile experience

It’s no surprise that a lot of Pinterest users like to use the channel on the go, but until this year the app was renowned for its bad UX. A new app design, faster load times and a darker ‘night mode’ were among the changes which were unveiled this year.

In the six months since the new changes were rolled out, Pinterest noted 800,000 weekly users using the progressive web app like a native app.

Group boards

While you could always add new collaborators to your Pinterest boards, 2018 was the year the platform became a lot more ‘social’ with these.

Now you can get notified when new members join the board – as well as actually being able to @mention people in the comments and like comments from other people. It seems a little bit strange that this functionality wasn’t introduced until this year!

Following Tab

Pinterest is all about recommendations and seeing suggestions based on what you’ve previously searched. But for those who only wanted to see Pins by certain brands or businesses, there is now an option for that.

March 2018 saw Pinterest launch a Following tab – where users can see the Pins from everyone they follow, in order of upload.

On mobile, users can easily toggle between the suggestions on the home page or the posts only from people they have followed.

Business page redesign

April 2018 saw Pinterest reveal a new layout for business pages.

The update included the introduction of a dynamic cover image, which allowed businesses to highlight the content which they want customers to see first. This could be a specific board, most recent activity, or a certain set of Pins.

A useful stat added in the update was monthly users, allowing businesses to see how many people viewed their Pins over the past 30 days.

Want to know more about changes in social media? Check out our round-ups of 2018 on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.