“The future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords,” stated Pinterest CEO, Ben Silbermann. And with so much consumer and brand weight behind it, it’s no surprise that visual search promises to be a breakout trend of 2019.*
Pinterest was first launched in 2010, the same year as Instagram, but after spending many years demonstrating very minimal growth in comparison to the social media giant, it now seems to be finding its feet as a serious platform for marketers.
Tech Crunch reported that over two hundred and fifty million people are now using Pinterest every month, up from 200 million from the previous year. And “Pins,” or items saved to the site, are growing, too. There are now 175 billion of them, a 75 percent increase YOY.
So what has made Pinterest become so desirable after so long? As a platform, Pinterest actually operates much more like a search engine rather than a sharing a sharing platform. Consumers use it as a research point, looking for inspiration and ideas. Visual search has become a huge trend, with 62% of Millennials preferring to search through imagery.
Google, Amazon and Bing have been leading the development of this technology across search engines, however Pinterest is the only social media platform that compete with the search engine giants on this level.
Key Visual Search Stats
- Images are returned for 19% of search queries on Google
- There are over 600 million visual searches on Pinterest each month. Image-based Pinterest Ads have an 8.5% conversion rate, and Pinterest is projected to clear $1 billion a year in ad revenue by 2020
- The image recognition market is expected to grow to $25.65 billion by 2019
- By 2021, early adopter brands which redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.
So if there was ever a time for brands to start pinning, now is the time!
SOURCE
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