← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
New Features Released on Pinterest {2025}
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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin podcast. Today I'm going to be covering all the latest features that Pinterest has released from May to November in 2025 and they have done about two to three updates or new feature releases at least each month, all with the idea of helping to create a better experience for the Pinner content creators and advertisers. So what I'm going to do is go month by month through what we've seen released, who it benefits and how it can help you in your business. If you want to stay up to date on all the changes and updates happening on Pinterest, then the best place for you to get those in real time is our Pinterest Made simple newsletter that is released every single Wednesday. So go to simplepinmedia.com newsletter and you can get access to the that there it is, filled with all the latest changes, any articles we find from Google and so much more. Let's go all the way back to May, which seems kind of crazy. May is when we first saw generative AI labels. This would be where users would now see on their pin modified with AI. I believe it's in the bottom left hand corner and and that would tell you if it was created with AI or not. This was a way to then alert users who couldn't see the difference between AI or not AI, an opportunity to detect that it was AI. This has been a little bit of a bumpy rollout and part of it was to try to combat AI slop. It's also when we saw the Visit site button emerge as well. Actually I'm going to go back even one month. That was in April. So we saw saw visit site attached to pins. Instead of being able to click on a pin, you had to scroll down a little bit and click on visit site. And then we saw this generative AI labels. Now the jury's still out whether or not this is helpful or not. We've seen it pop up on some images that were created with AI and some images that weren't. We've also seen it pop up on actually human created images, which means there's a little bit of a flaw in the filter. I will say whenever you get new updates released on any platform, there's always going to be this learning time or a glitch time. So it's important to give patience during those windows so that we can see how it's going to perform and then see how they course correct. Jury's still out on this one. There's been an update since May that I think will correlate with this one. But obviously I'll get to that when we talk about it. Also in May, we saw a visual search update. Visual search is this really important piece on the platform where when you look at an image in the bottom right corner there is a little magnifying glass. If you click on it, then you can hover over any part of the image and it will actually show you a certain portion of that image. Say you're looking for a lamp on a table. It will all of a sudden zero in on that lamp and show you options for where you can purchase. So getting better at this visual search is really important to Pinterest because it's all visual based and this is fueled by AI in order to help users discover and refine their ideas through this multi module, multimodal modal. There you go, search. So that was May. June we saw AI powered auto collages. This is an advertiser tool, which means if you're running Pinterest ads, you might want to try some of this. This is where advertisers can turn their catalog into shoppable collages. Let's say you had four to five slides that were showing an image of a boot that maybe you have in four different colors. You could easily scroll through those in the Pinterest ad to be able to target customers in a more detailed way. So let's say the the customer was looking for a brown boot and your ad was surfaced, but now they can see that it comes in a camel color or a brown suede or a brown leather or black. It gives an opportunity for more purchasing. The next was a Trends tool update. We saw the kind of beginning of trends getting an overhaul. So so we saw shopping trends, trends in the spotlight and editors pick. If you've never used the Trends tool, let me say right now it's one of the most powerful tools we have with Pinterest marketing. Simply go to Trends Pinterest. Com and you will continue to see refinement happen over there. What I love about this update is we really had this broad here's the trends. But now we're going to be able to drill down into content and shopping where, which are two very different things on Pinterest. The Pinterest user might be going there to search for a product that they're going to use, maybe travel accessories or travel outfits. And maybe they even want to look for five tips for traveling to Portugal. One is content, one is products. This helps you as a marketer Figure out how to target them when they're searching for these two particular things and in those two silos. Right. Also in June we saw what was called Pinterest Brand Studio. This is a one stop shop suite of solutions for creative experts. They're designed to help advertisers make more inspiring, effective ads. Again, this is an ads tool. So if you are a company and you are really struggling with creative, you don't know how to make a really great pin. You're just in general feel like you're lacking. If you are working with a Pinterest rep, you can contact them and say, I would love to connect with the Pinterest brand Studio. Now I know nothing about how much this costs, what you need to spend per day, but I do know that our team at Simple Pen Media, we do this for our ad clients and we make amazing images for our ad clients. Just want to push, put that plug there. All right, let's go to September. September is where we see a new release for product sellers. These are called where to Buy links. Where to Buy links were released and these are for product sellers that can now drive customers directly to an available item. Now I don't understand how this is different from a basic product pin, but it says these are going to be available in the Pinterest Ads Manager. So I'm going to go with the fact that this is more of an advertising feature, a more quick, quick feature for you to click on this pin ad specifically and go to purchase pretty quickly. So where to buy thing links might allow you to see where you can buy at more locations. So that let's say you're a CPG brand which is called Consumer Packaged Good. You sell granola. I went to the Food show back in January of 25. It was really fascinating. It was called the Fancy Food Show. I'm thinking all of these retailers, let's say you sell a protein bar or you sell a protein granola and you're trying to get into Whole Foods, or we have a local grocery store here called New Seasons or you wanted to get into Kroger, you might not have your own standalone store or maybe you might, you could have both, but you would like to show the Pinterest user where they can buy this particular product. So take an example of granola. You are running ads and you have this amazing protein granola and you want to knock it out of the park in January and February because that's what everybody's thinking about, health. Then you would get access to this where to buy integration and all of a sudden it would show that it would be Whole Foods or Kroger or whatever. So people could go to the store and buy. That's a pret great thing because a lot of what the Pinterest user base is informed by is what they see on Pinterest, but then they might go to the store that is really difficult to track sometimes. So I see this as an opportunity with an in store purchase, but also an online purchase. If those retailers make it possible. The next in September, which I'm going to dub September Ad update because we really mostly saw updates that that came to ads. The other one is top of search ads, meaning the ads will appear directly within the top 10 search results and in related pins. This is in beta. This is probably so expensive. I'll just put that there right now. So what they're saying is that when people shop on Pinterest they often begin with a visual search. 45% of clicks occur in the top 10 search results with 96% of top searches being unbranded. These are the moments when users are most open to discovering and deciding on new products. So in order to help brands reach these high intent shoppers, they are previewing Pinterest top of search ads, which is a beta across all monetized markets. Again, they appear right up at the top. I've seen those in my app. If you've not, I would imagine right after this conversation you can go open your app and you will probably see them again. If you are not, if you have not dove, if you have not jumped into Pinterest ads, you can't jump into this anyway. But it is just good to know this little tidbit of information. I said it a second ago, but I think it's really important. 45% of clicks occur in the top 10 search results and also in related pins. That's actually really good to know and where you would probably get the bulk of your clicks. Let's move to October and then I'm going to get to November. You are listening to this in December. Obviously I had to record in November so there could have been updates in December, but we're just going to stop in November. October saw another layer to generative AI content controls. So remember back in May we saw the Jennai labels that sounded like I said Jedi but generative AI labels. Now we have in October generative AI content controls. Users can now choose how much AI content they want in their feed for topic categories. And right now I believe at the time of recording There are 10.
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It does not include food, which has probably been the most requested generative AI controls that people have wanted. But that being said, you can go into your settings and you as a user can decide what you want to see of AI and what you don't want to see of AI. Here's an opportunity for you. If you know that majority of the people who follow you are using Pinterest, you can probably find this in your analytics by seeing who is coming to my website and where are they coming from, right? If you see a lot is from Pinterest, there's an opportunity for you to educate your audience on this and say are you maybe a little bit tired of the AI that you're finding on Pinterest? Here is this little option I'm going to show you. I'm going to link to it and you guys can get the link down below in the description. I'm going to link to it and then you can go turn off where you don't want to see AI. It is not a perfect system yet. I've turned them all off and I'm still getting AI Again it is November, they released this in October. We're still well within the glitch window and things getting figured out so that is there and they plan to expand to more categories. Next is AI powered boards. So they want to make boards more personalized and.
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Really cater to your taste and help you shop based on your taste. This is going to be available over the next few months globally. Here's what they say. Pinterest is introducing new AI powered upgrades to its boards to transform them from a simple organizational tool into a more product personalized way of browsing. Pinterest users will start to see these updates over the next few months and they will have a fresh new look and new tabs based on the users saved pins. So watch the changes for your boards. You might see that these are getting some updates. Check them out, see when it happens for you. In addition they will have something called make it yours for Fashion and Home Decor. This tab will recommend products and content to help users bring their inspirations to life. And then there will also be more ideas which will provide recommended related pins for all other board categories such as beauty, recipes and art. All Saves is where you can find all of your previously saved pins. You can view these tabs by viewing your boards from your profile. Right now what we have is created and saved. So how I read this is we're going to start saving seen something that says more ideas in all saves so it'll be interesting to see what profile updates we see in the next little bit. So just be paying attention for that. The last update we got in October was called Pinterest Assistant. This is an AI powered kind of visual first collaborator assistant that essentially is like ChatGPT for Pinterest. You can ask it a long form question instead of just using keywords. I recently dropped this podcast episode in my newsletter which is another reason you should subscribe to my newsletter. It was an interview with the CEO of HubSpot on do this not that podcast. It's a new to me podcast so I haven't listened to it for a long time. But I came across this one and she said the most revolutionary thing that I cannot stop thinking about. She said people used to search with about 5, 4 words. Now on average they search with 23. So if we take Pinterest to be in the search and discovery platform and we know that people approach the platform with the mindset of I, I'll know it when I see it, then bringing in something like a Pinterest assistant is super helpful because people can take those long form questions and they could put them in there and they can get to what they want quicker. Everybody is having an AI assistant. I even have it in one of my travel hacking apps that I use. So I am not surprised by this at all. I think that it will. It's just part of where our world and our online search is going now to November. One of the big changes that we saw is in Instagram account claiming so so back In July of 2024 Pinterest released a feature and I have a YouTube video on it as well. I'll link it here below where you could essentially integrate your Instagram account with your Pinterest account and it would auto publish for you. This was another way to help Gen Z who might not have a website, they might have started their business on Instagram. So it's a way to increase reach for their content in a new platform. So you could auto publish your pins to Instagram. One update they made in between is that you could auto publish those to a secret board which was helpful because sometimes your Instagram content is not a good fit content for Pinterest. Also we recommend that anybody who has a website that you would make sure that you don't always link directly to Instagram, but you make sure those links go to your website. Pinterest came in in November and solved a lot of those problems. They 1 added the feature of direct linking. So now your auto publish pins link to your claimed domain, essentially turning it into like the visit site button, which would increase your site traffic. This is really great because now if you're creating content on Instagram, let's say you created a really great how to reel. You could post it on Pinterest or have it auto post and instead of going back to that reel, they would go to your website. That is great for those of us that do have a website. If you don't have a website and you still just have Instagram, it remains like it was originally Pinterest to Instagram Number two update is carousel conversion. Instagram carousels are super popular. You can actually do up to 20 of them. I kind of think that's excessive, but a lot of people do it. They are automatically published on Pinterest as carousel pins, preserving the original format and maintaining that content flow. Here is a hitch that a couple of us, Heather Farris is a fellow educator with with me at Pinterest and we were actually just voxering this morning about this is that Pinterest carousels are capped at five slides. So if somebody has 20, will Pinterest cap it? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I am working on getting that. Heather is doing some testing. We're asking Pinterest to see because we don't want that to break it and have you just have five, but there's another 15 that people need in order to get context. Right. But I kind of thought carousel pins were dying a little bit. My YouTube algorithm keeps showing my carousel pins video to everybody. And because the functionality has changed a little bit, people keep getting annoyed with me, which I kind of thought carousels were dying. Apparently they're not. So if you have this Instagram connection, just note there might be some bumps in the road with carousel conversion. The last update to this Instagram account claiming is keyword filtering. It will automatically exclude content, for example, posts with ad in the caption from being auto published to Pinterest by specifying specific keywords, phrases or hashtags within the original caption. Right now we only know that that is ad. I don't know if there's other things that will prevent it from being auto published. I'll look into that. But I like this because if you're getting paid on the Instagram side for a campaign with a company and that auto publishes to Pinterest, then they will exclude it, which is actually really helpful because you can go back to that brand and say, hey, I'm also on Pinterest. Maybe you should pay me as well for doing a Pinterest campaign. Just saying. All right, this was a lot of links. Thank you to those who stayed this long and went through this with me. One, I'm gonna have all the links down below in the description so you can go read through them. Two, if you are marketing actively on Pinterest or running Pinterest ads, it is really important that you stayed up to date on all the latest features. So Again, go to simplepinmedia.com newsletter and we will deliver that up to you every Wednesday. Are there any updates I missed? Is there anything that you all have seen that you have leveraged that I didn't include in this master list? We would love to hear from you. You can email us hello simplepin media.com or if you're on YouTube, you can just drop a comment below. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening and for watching. Sam.