As Pinterest looks to further expand beyond just the audience you’d expect to use it, it’s going to have to start chasing down users and meet them on different territories — and that includes messaging apps.
So today Pinterest is launching a pair of updates that is going to help it tap into that audience of people that are sharing content on Facebook Messenger. People might already be copying links to Pinterest and pasting them in Messenger, but the company is looking to make that a little more seamless to get to the point where you can go into Messenger and be able to regularly interact with Pinterest.
The bot works as you’d expect — you open up a chat with the Pinterest bot and type in an idea you’re interested in, like food or clothing. The bot will then start recommending ideas from Pinterest, for which you can take a deeper dive in at any point if you’re interested in them. Pinterest is the latest in a wave of companies to see some kind of opportunity in a platform like Messenger, though it still seems the full story on that has yet to play out.
The chat extension brings Pinterest’s experience closer to the Messenger experience, allowing users to both link out pins in a Facebook message and dive deeper into that content within the messenger. So when you go into a pin on Messenger, you’ll start to see and feel something that is a little bit like the core Pinterest experience without actually leaving Messenger.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Pinterest start to look beyond just its home platform in order to get people closer and closer to executing on an idea. Pinterest earlier this year rolled out QR codes that will show up in stores, another move that’s trying to collapse the distance between a user’s everyday behavior and getting them to actually get on Pinterest and start saving content.
With more than 200 million monthly active users, Pinterest is still a bit of a blip compared to Facebook — though, the audience behavior is certainly different in a lot of ways. But as Pinterest looks to continue to grow, it has to start looking in places that it might not normally look in order to get people interested in the service. Getting tied more closely with Facebook Messenger, a service with more than 1 billion users, seems like a pretty natural place to start.