Pinvolve Converts Facebook Pages Into Pinterest Pinboards, Increases Repins By 150%+

The folks behind a forthcoming fashion catalog for the iPad, Bazaart, have launched an interesting side project in their downtime (what’s that?) from their participation in DreamIt’s new Israel-based startup accelerator program. In need of something similar for themselves, the company launched a Facebook app called “Pinvolve” which converts Facebook Pages into Pinterest pinboards.

To use Pinvolve, you have to first be logged into Facebook as one of the page’s admins before installing the app. Once up-and-running, Pinvolve creates a new section on your Facebook page which presents all your photo posts in a Pinterest-like fashion – that is, in the typical image pinboard style that’s now associated with the popular social networking service.

The app also pulls in the Facebook likes and comments associated with each post, as well as the comments’ text. If a post has a lot of comments, however, only the first few will be listed on the main Pinvolve page, with a link to the rest provided below. When clicked, that link will take you to the photo’s page on Facebook.

However, Pinvolve isn’t just about re-displaying Facebook content with a Pinterest look-and-feel, it also provides tools that let you and the page’s fans re-share those posts over on Pinterest. When you hover over an image on the Pinvolve pinboard, Pinterest’s “Pin it” button appears. Clicking this will then re-post that content to Pinterest itself.

You can see an example of Pinvolve in action now, over on fashion model, blogger and designer Audrey Kitching’s Facebook Page here.

According to Bazaart co-founder Dror Yaffe, the idea for Pinvolve came from his team’s own need to market their content on what’s now the third most popular social network.

“We’ve been marketing our applications on Facebook and Twitter, but when Pinterest became a major player we were baffled,” he says. “As a young startup, our resources are very limited and it takes a lot of effort to market on another social network. So, as a side project, we’ve developed Pinvolve.”

Despite the fact that the company has done very little marketing or media outreach, (save for a bit coverage by Israeli sites), the app is already installed on over 1,000 Facebook Pages as of today. Using Pinvolve on its own page, Yaffe says they’ve increased their re-pins by over 150%, and this figure is consistent across the app’s early adopters.

Although the basic version is being made available for free, Facebook page owners are offered an option to upgrade to Pinvolve’s white label plan, which removes the “Get Pinvolve Now” button from the page, and allows you to customize the “like” button, the cover photo, and lets you link from the app directly to your Pinteret profile. For now, this option is available for the (pretty much no-brainer) price of $9.99. It will later bump up to $19.99.

To try out Pinvolve for yourself, head over to the app’s page here: http://apps.facebook.com/pinvolve.