When Pinterest first came on the scene in 2010, it was an experiment in creativity and interests framed in a taxonomy. Social Media Today brought this interesting information to our attention in their article, “Pinterest Provides Additional Insights into its Pin Classification Process.”
Originally, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann summarized the company as a “catalogue of ideas” that inspires users to “go out and do that thing”, rather than as an image-based social network. Now it operates almost half and half user generated content and advertising, for financial funding reasons.
Regardless, content is classified and sorted based on some basic pre-set categories and then those created and assigned by the users. It really is a homegrown taxonomy-like organizational system of ideas, inspirations, recipes, and styles.
Behind the curtains at Pinterest, their engineering team has their own customized taxonomy to drive their classification processes. This is important for potential marketers to understand and use to maximize their impact.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
