In minutes, a potential traveler may combine ideas from a Pinterest board, a booking site and a travel itinerary they found on a lifestyle website. The fragmented way that people now research travel options has changed the way travel advertisers approach the data that fuels their campaigns, according to Sarah Scherer, product marketing manager at digital media buying firm Goodway Group.

Pinterest has also introduced features to make it easier for retailers to upload and promote product content. And video-first platforms Snapchat and TikTok are both testing shoppable content features. The rise of shoppable content on social media has laid the foundation for the next phase of product discovery: shoppable video.

We will update our US ad revenue forecasts for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest in June 2020. For that reason, we’re focusing the discussion in this section on the broader social media market, rather than on individual properties. What Will Happen in Q2. April will see continued social ad spending declines; May and June have a high degree of uncertainty.

Pinterest: Influencer marketing isn’t new to Pinterest, but interest is increasing in some verticals. The platform’s abilities to drive product discovery and purchasing are particular strengths. In 2018, 77.4 million people in the US—or nearly a quarter of the population—used Pinterest, a 7.0% increase from 2017, according to our estimates.

“Instagram has seen huge growth, but Pinterest will be the next big platform,” said Brooke Robinson, managing partner at Peersway Nano Influencer Marketing. “Pinterest Canada launched their head office in Toronto, and they're going to start working with agencies and brands.

Ad-buying technology provider Kenshoo reported that CPMs on social properties (including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat) were down 7% in Q1 year over year. That included a period of dramatically falling prices from March 1 to about March 22. But after that, prices began to stabilize.

Insights West polling from May 2019 found a similar social media appetite for this age group, which outpaced the older groups for usage on every platform (excluding Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn). That’s true for Facebook, too, which was presumed to have lost significant users among younger age groups.

“All of my current campaigns have been postponed and one has been canceled,” said Melissa Johnson, a creator focused on food and recipes, who works primarily on Pinterest and Instagram. Johnson said she has shifted her content to focus on routines and normalcy, striving to offer value to her audience in a way that still feels “on brand” with her regular content.

Seldom buzzed about as a teen venue, Pinterest has a sizeable presence among them. We estimate that 22.8% of 12-to-17s will be Pinterest users this year. Also under the radar are social platforms that have won devoted followers among teens but without achieving the mass commanded by top-tier sites. TikTok (known until recently as Musical.ly) is an example.

Nearly every marketing team surveyed (96%) said they bought social media ads on that platform—substantially more than those who cited Twitter (75%), Instagram (59%) and Pinterest (16%). Investment in social advertising is likely growing due to an uptick in social commerce adoption among consumers.

This technology is also filtering into social media properties like Snapchat, which now lets users take a picture of an item and buy it on Amazon or Pinterest. In theory, visual search can make the digital path to purchase for consumers even more seamless than it already is. See something you want to buy out in the wild? Just take a picture and let a visual search engine guide you to a product page.

Instagram (10.7%) was a distant second, followed by Pinterest (8.2%). We forecast that 91.2% of Facebook users will access the platform on a smartphone in 2019, amounting to 156 million users. The number of users who will access exclusively on mobile devices (including tablets) will reach 113.7 million in 2019. Time spent on social networks with mobile devices far outpaces computers.

The differences between a few years ago and the modern iteration is that social media is not necessarily serving as a transactional platform, and Facebook, the original focus, has shifted to more visual properties like Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. "Buy buttons" have evolved and brands are attempting to monetize stories. Now it's all about influence.

Republicans overindexed on Facebook and Pinterest within the social media category, but also had an outsized presence on the sites of major sports leagues, other sports news sites like CBS Sports and ESPN and certain retail sites like Walmart and eBay.

Social shopping behavior like buying through Instagram or Pinterest has yet to take hold in a major way, so these figures are slightly surprising. In a PayPal holiday survey conducted last year, 28% of US internet users ages 18 to 55 would consider purchasing through social media while holiday shopping, and 19% would consider it in the next five years. The majority (53%), however, weren't interested.

With in-person interactions ground to a halt, consumers in countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic are turning to live video to stay connected.

In the latest episode of "Behind the Numbers," eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman assesses Pinterest's recent IPO. How did it fair? What does it mean for the company going forward—and what might trip it up along the way?