Pinterest Place Pins: Travel Planners Everywhere Rejoice!

It’s no secret that Pinterest is up there when it comes to our favourite ways to pass the time, it’s a place we both love to find inspiration and collect ideas, products, words and places we love.  To us, it’s not just another social network, in fact it’s now the third largest source of referral traffic on the internet, helping people to discover things that interest them. It's a social media network that doesn't promote self-indulgence, inspires the user and connects people to other people that share the same interests and passions. Above all it’s the meaningful social media platform and should be set apart from the big guns; Facebook & Twitter.

In 2012 Pinterest Co-founder & CEO Ben Silbermann was worried about the number of users only reaching 3,000 since the platform’s launch in 2010, but good things take time, and today Pinterest boasts 70 million 'pinsters' (pinning gansters!), with the UK ranking third for the amount of users. Brands are getting involved too, click here to see our simple tips on how to create an inspiring presence on Pinterest.

People pin anything from recipes and products, to style tips, news articles and quotes to inspire them at work, while shopping and at home, and of course for their next exciting adventure. Every day people pin approximately 1.5 million places, accumulating in more than 750 million pins of destinations on Pinterest. 

Pinterest doesn't stop at just an online pinboard of things we like, it has a much greater mission: to help users turn their inspiration into a reality. Cue Place Pins, rolled out by the company at the end of last year…

What are Place Pins?

Place Pins (or Pinterest Maps) enable users to map out the locations of all the items they share on their pinboards. For example, if a user pins a photo of a delicious meal they enjoyed at a restaurant while on holiday in France they can also add the restaurant’s location to a map on their board.

Place pins could revolutionise the way we plan our travel; before heading to New York City I could look at this brilliant board from SarahTolzmann, Web Designer at Ralph Lauren and blogger behind Note to Self. I could then repin any of the hotspots she has highlighted onto my very own trip itinerary board. I can hear the planners out there bursting with excitement!

Ultimately it’s part of Pinterest’s mantra to make pins more useful, including more meta data and useful information such as the contact details so you can easily pull up details you need - something I found particularly useful as my frequently on-the-go googling fails to bring up the extra details on the first page such as postcodes and phone numbers.

How can you use them?

It’s very easy to create a board of place pins, you can either select ‘Add A Map’ when starting a board from scratch or edit an existing board’s settings – start with a board you've dedicated to travel as this will be the easiest way to get to grips with the feature.

Pinterest allows you to create boards with friends too so you can plan your holiday or trip as a team, and if creating a board of your favourite things to do in your favourite city, you can send your board to a friend who is planning their next holiday to the same destination to spread your inspiration!

Have a little look at Jane’s ‘I’d Like To Be’ place board to inspire you to give it a go yourself!  Jane puts in all the destinations, hotels and even restaurants she'd like to visit, keeping a record in one place. Jane loves the way she's able to easily see all the pins on one large map in order to plan her next trip.

The future of Pinterest Maps

Place Pins are the network’s first effort to make Pinterest more useful for travel and for someone looking to plan a trip away, getting the chance to tap into to real people recommending real places in your dream destination is more than valuable. It remains true to Pinterest’s goal to encourage users to actually visit the places on their ‘Where to Next?’ boards, inspiring and enriching users to live the life they really want.

With time and more improvements, the team at Pinterest will iron out a few little niggles, namely the limited places when searching to place your pin – but you can of course add your own too. The sharing place boards are a great idea, the only thing is that when a friend pins to the board, there still requires someone to ‘place’ the pin onto the map too.

The future of Pinterest & the main man Ben Silbermann

We listened to CEO Ben Silbermann talk at a recent Google Hangout with Virgin Unite (read our blog post about it here) and since then we've read a lot about his start up journey. So much of his advice resonates with us, especially about building a product that people enjoy and one makes the end-user’s life better every day. Below are a few gems from Ben we want to share with you and, if you have ten minutes today, have a look at this video of Ben speaking at a networking event too.

...and our favourite: “Don’t give up”

Happy place pinning and here’s to all those destinations becoming a reality! 

Katie x