Remember learning about “half-life” in high school Biology class?

A refresher: the time required for one half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate.

Let’s apply this to social media: the half life of a Tweet is approximately 15 minutes – in other words, half of all people that will see your Tweet will see it in the first 15 minutes, and the other half might see it over the next couple hours. The half life of a Facebook or Instagram post is around 8 hours.

But the half life of a Pin? It’s between 3 and 4 months.

Because of the nature of Pinterest’s platform and its algorithm, Pins live on forever. So now, more than ever, creating and marketing content on Pinterest needs to be a part of your social media advertising strategy.

Pinterest’s New Ad Products

First off, above anything else, a strategy for your organic Pinterest posting is crucial.

Pinterest is improving its product very quickly, and they recently introduced a key new feature: Lens. Lens is a visual discovery tool which enables consumers to use the camera function within the Pinterest app to point at physical entities in the real world, and match what the camera sees to Pins on Pinterest to help you find you what you’re looking for, or related items.

It’s an incredible new feature, on the edge of augmented reality, which is where social media is headed. Again, an organic Pinterest strategy is important, but in this post, I want to focus on the new developments with Pinterest’s advertising platform.

A few weeks ago, Pinterest introduced Pinterest search ads. These ads are available for keyword targeting and shopping campaigns.

This new ad feature gives Pinterest the ability to tap into consumer purchase behavior more than ever. Pinterest is notorious for being a place where people save and search for things they want to buy. Now, as a brand, you can bid on those searches and be at the top of the results they see, enabling you to reach searchers at the exact right time.

As an advertising/marketing agency owner, I hope that Pinterest soon releases search volume data, which would be absolute gold. Google Search is obviously the current leader when it comes to search-related ads. But Pinterest sees around 2 billion searches a month from its 175 million active users. Search ads are ripe for disruption, and it’ll be very interesting to see how this evolves over time.

Pinterest Video Ads

Pinterest recently introduced video ads to its ad offering, which they advanced to autoplay video just this week.

What does this mean to you? Pinterest is doing everything it can to keep up with Facebook. It doesn’t want to lose advertising dollars to its primary competitors. Look for these ads to get more popular as time goes by.

Start Running Pinterest Ads Today

There are countless success stories from brands of Pinterest Ads.

Some highlights that have been reported:

• 50% higher click to purchase rate
• 2600% increase in website traffic from Pinterest
• 90% lower CPM
• 40% higher subscription rate
• 70% increase in account signups
• 40% increase in revenue

It’s worth considering Pinterest ads in your strategic mix. Whether you’re an ecommerce brand, an app, or B2B, the business case for Pinterest is evolving. Visit Pinterest’s “Get Started” page for more information on how to get started.

Article Written by Brandon Doyle of Social Media Today