Pinterest never say that it is a social network. Instead, it's proud to be a discovery tool which connects users to ideas.
While many others are widening their efforts by creating more products and features, Pinterest has been busy, slowly building its platform and offerings, expanding not only its tools, but also strengthening its core. More specifically, it has commerce in mind.
With usage continues to grow, even reportedly faster than both Twitter and Snapchat, the company has launched another offering.
It's a collection of user profiles which are representative of its audience base.
The summaries outline who these people are, what they’re interested in, and why they use the platform. Each of these people have their own featured stories, along with statistics that represent their demographic subset.
This feature should interest both businesses and brands.
Expanding its tools, Pinterest has also launched a social collaboration tool, called the 'Activity Feed' for group boards.
This feature allows users to weigh in with a quick like or comment, '@' mention other users, or start a new thread. It also show updates when others add new pins, create new sections, new members join, someone likes or comments, and more.
Te Activity Feed brings the comment support a bit further, organizing them to make conversation easier to follow.
Pinterest is hoping to further facilitate users on its platform by introducing more things and deeper access to social features to keep users engaged.
Pinterest is also improving mobile experience further, with the addition of a night mode
The initiative started in 2015 when Pinterest experienced the engagements of users on mobile browsers were lacking, if compared to its native app which offered 80 percent higher engagement rate. Pinterest's native apps both on iOS and Android have flourished, but it saw that its mobile web app suffered.
It started to make an effort by improving its web app's performance, and improved efficiency for those users who access the platform from older devices or locations with limited data access. This led to some great results.
In a biog post, Zack Argyle, engineering manager for core experience at Pinterest, explained that "weekly active users on mobile web have increased 103% year-over-year overall, with a 156% increase in Brazil and 312% increase in India."
And in terms of engagement, "session length increased by 296%, the number of Pins seen increased by 401% and people were 295% more likely to save a Pin to a board. Logins also increased by 370% and new signups increased by 843% year-over-year."
Seeing its work paying off, Pinterest kept on improving its web app experience by adding a 'night mode' which essentially change the look and feel of Pins and the Pin feed.
The feature is initially available only through Pinterest's web app, and can be activated by logging in and toggling it in the settings section.