Last month, Pinterest announced a travel-focused feature called Place Pins which allowed Pinners to create pinned maps of places of interest for travel plans.
Travel brands were quick to deploy their own boards, as Pinterest wanted to be sure to have a robust roster of launch partners to demo the feature's potential. Pinterest even created a special feed for places to showcase how travel was being deployed on the network.
The pinnning network has recently been focused on ways to make the service more useful:
Place Pins are our first effort to make Pinterest more useful for travel. It follows other ways we’re making your Pins more actionable in real life, including Product, Article, Movie and Recipe Pins. We hope you find Place Pins helpful, and we can’t wait to see your new place boards.
Here are some highlights of some of the most successful place boards.
Road Tripper's "Keep America Weird"
Roadtrip planning startup Roadtrippers has one of the best place boards on Pinterest.
Directly integrated with their blog, the place board uses the well-design graphics from each place to emphasize what the reader can learn from each pin. Not only does this act as a lead generation tool for their blog, it also establishes the brand as a design-focused expert in the area of road trips.
Each point can be brought together for a full road trip, and together, each pin really engages the reader by encouraging exploration of the various points that make America a vibrant road trip destination.
AFAR's Best Street Markets
AFAR Magazine has used their place board to emphasize their unique approach to authentic travel: beautiful photos, extensively researched tips, and well-written content all come together on their place boards outlining the vibrant street markets in the world.
AFAR used Foursquare to bring in the various points of interest, providing another means of organizing information. By using other posts via Foursquare, the brand is able to access another community while also extending their authority on travel.
Conde Nast Traveler's "Top 100 Hotels in the World"
We like this place board because it extends an already-known list into a very visual format that's easy to explore. Place boards seem ideally suited to this sort of extension, as it eliminates the need for brands to invest in their own mapping interface.
Conde Nast Traveler has also linked each of the hotels back to their website, allowing users to learn more about each individual hotel and providing healthy inbound traffic for the media brand.
Airbnb's "Loved by Tokyoites"
Airbnb has taken a straightforward approach to distilling hosts' local knowledge into their place boards. This not only reinforces their brand positioning as far as the value of staying with locals, but also delivers certain hosts more exposure for their listings and their favorite places.
Visit Britain's UNESCO Heritage Sites
Visit Britain took a smart approach with their UNESCO Heritage Site place board. By focusing on thematic place boards, the national destination board was able to place emphasis on specific themes special to that particular country.
This is something that could be done in an infinite variations: best fish and chips in the country, top concerts, areas of historical interest for Britain...the list goes on. Every DMO should be taking advantage of this opportunity - as should every tours and activities operator.
Who else is looking good on Pinterest Places? Comment below if someone in particular stands out.