Pinterest on Monday announced a Marketing Developer Partners program for its content publishing API, following the lead of Facebook and Twitter.
The API will enable brands, who produce two-thirds of the content on Pinterest, to manage workflow and optimization of organic Pinterest content through their preferred centralized marketing platform.
“We want to enable the developers in the market to develop tools for businesses to optimize their presence on Pinterest and increase scale,” said Jyri Kidwell, head of marketing developer partnerships.
The 10 partners selected are Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, Newscred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Tailwind.
“Pinterest is definitely a company that is on the road to maturity. APIs are part of the development of a social platform,” said Rebecca Lieb, industry analyst at Altimeter Group. “They need the developer community to make [Pinterest] more usable for the brands.”
That’s not the only API in the works. Separately, Pinterest revealed that its ads API, designed for performance advertisers, is now in beta with its own set of unnamed partners.
That ads API would allow brands to user partners to gain similar efficiencies around performance optimization and workflow for their advertising campaigns on Pinterest.
Pinterest’s nascent advertising business is gaining scale. In January, its CPM-based Promoted Pins for brand and awareness campaigns exited beta.
Its companion performance product, launched a month after the CPM product in June, sells on a CPC basis, and still requires a wait list to join. Advertisers can only buy against keywords, not in the home feed.
But volume appears strong, with a higher ad load than might be expected from an ad platform still partially in beta: A search for “apartment decorating” yielded eight Promoted Pins from mid-size advertisers, while the more long-tail search “hiking New York” came up with two.
“Pinterest users come to plan their future,” Kidwell said. With the APIs, Pinterest is planning its future as a social platform too.
