Influencers on LTK’s affiliate trading platform may soon have access to a huge new audience: Pinterest users. Under a new partnership announced today, high-performing image posts on LTK will be automatically reposted to Pinterest; the pilot program is expected to expand to more authors and content formats in the coming months.
According to the company, LTK is a huge part of influencer marketing and online shopping in general – almost 40 percent of Gen Z women in the US use it, and it’s standard practice for influencers to drive their audience to their LTK pages so they can earn affiliate commissions on purchases. The Pinterest pilot will be gradually rolled out over the next few months, and LTK influencers do not need to sign up; they just need to post “high-quality, stylized” images on LTK.
When a post on LTK is shared on Pinterest, a link to the influencer’s profile and their tagged products appears. At the very least, content creators hope that reaching millions of Pinterest users will lead to increased affiliate earnings. Pinterest is popular among people looking for inspiration – for example, users who are renovating their homes or looking for hairstyle ideas – and some of them are clearly looking for something to buy. There are already ads on the platform, but posts by influencers can be more appealing to users than something coming directly from a brand.
The desire to bring in influencer content from other platforms is related to a broader issue that Pinterest is grappling with: the flood of artificial intelligence-generated content that has flooded its feeds. In April, the company said it was working on the problem and introduced new tools to identify and label AI-generated content. The company is also testing the possibility of allowing users to see fewer AI posts.
