Pinterest Partners with LTK to Expand its Product Listings

Pinterest has announced a new partnership with affiliate shopping platform LTK, which will see the best-performing image posts from LTK automatically cross-posted to Pinterest as well.

LTK (which is acronym for “like to know”) provides a platform for influencers to showcase affiliate products, via shoppable posts, similar to social media updates.

So, really, it’s pretty similar to Pinterest’s listings anyway, though LTK is more focused on tutorials and demonstration-style clips, as well as local fashion discovery, hosted by a range of brand ambassadors and creators.

The new partnership will only relate to image posts at present.

As reported by The Verge:

“When an LTK post is shared to Pinterest, a link to the influencer’s profile and their tagged products will follow. The hope, at least for content creators, is that getting pushed to Pinterest’s millions of users will result in more affiliate earnings.”

LTK currently serves 40 million monthly users, with users able to search through products from over a million brands.

Pinterest, meanwhile, is now up to 570 million monthly actives, with the vast majority of those users coming to the app in a shopping mindset. Much-removed from its social media roots, Pinterest is now predominantly focused on shopping discovery, which makes this partnership an obvious match.

Though I’m not sure why they don’t just merge instead. I mean, I understand that each company has its own motivations and strategy, but they seem like pretty closely aligned offerings, and if Pinterest just purchased LTK and integrated its discovery tools instead, that would seemingly be a more logical partnership.

Though also a more costly one, and this may well accomplish similar strategic goals either way, enabling LTK to continue to grow, while also offering expanded reach to Pinterest’s audience.

And if it catches on, maybe the two will look to expand their partnership in future.

Pinterest now has variations of direct listing partnerships with Amazon, Shopify, and WooCommerce, enabling customers of these third-party platforms to extend their promotions and profiles to Pinterest as well.

LTK adds another one to the list, which expands Pinterest’s potential catalog even further, enhancing its shopping capacity.