Does Pinterest’s Pin Collective herald the new age of the micro-influencer?

As brands turn to micro-influencers for more authentic, quality story-telling, Pinterest has this week delved even deeper into the influencer marketplace with its new feature Pin Collective.

The idea of Pin Collective is to introduce the best content creators on the network to brands looking for great content, to ultimately benefit both sides.

Pinterest has hand-selected a group of publishers, production shops and creators who publish visually aesthetic images and craft pins that capture the attention of users.

By pairing brands with these pro-pinners they will be able to work together directly to create influential content that will get more engagement. Although brands can already connect with significant individuals on prominent social sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, with the help of these influencers there are suddenly new opportunities to create viral pins, buyable pins and promoted pins with video.

This comes at a time when influencers are at the core of every digital marketing strategy. Until now, of course, digital marketing has been all about engaging with people who have the most followers.

No longer though.

There has been a shift in the sands of late. More and more brands are turning to people with far less followers – the micro-blogger is very much king.

Today is all about quality not quantity for brands.

Household names want to work with micro-bloggers to tell more authentic stories rather than relying on heavily airbrushed and staged photos from social media and TV stars.

Micro-bloggers’ content also performs better organically as they receive far better engagement-per-post, as fans genuinely follow them for inspiration rather than just because they’re famous.

Brands are increasingly finding that working with these smaller-scale digital personalities means their unique and tailor-made posts win a more positive reception with followers. On Instagram, for example, influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 followers see a 2.4 percent like rate while those with between 1 million – 10 million followers receive just a 1.7 percent like rate.

Although Pinterest already has an in-house initiative, Pin Factory, which aims to guide advertisers to craft promoted pins, with Pin Collective the company will simply work as a matchmaker between brand and influencer who will then work together directly.

The gap between brand and influencer, the secret to creating authentic and successful brand awareness, is getting smaller by the day.

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