Pinvolve App Turns Facebook Pages Into Pinboards

By Alexandra Mann, NoCamels April 18, 2012 2 minutes

Pinvolve - Technology News - Israel

An Israeli company that is behind Bazaart – a fashion catalog for iPads – has released a side project named Pinvolve that converts Facebook Pages into Pinterest boards.

Pinvolve is an app that creates a new section in your Facebook Page, presenting the Facebook content in a Pinterest fashion- pinboard style. To use it, users need administrative permissions for the page.

With Pinvolve, Facebook pages can benefit from the Pinterest style that appeals to fashion and lifestyle content, while Pinterest profiles can gain traffic and exposure from Facebook’s massive user base.

The most beneficial feature resulting from integrating both social networks is that Facebook comments are associated directly to the content appearing on Pinterest. Re-sharing Pins on Pinterest from the Facebook page is also an option, with the well-known “Pin it” button that appears when hovering over an image.

Earlier this month, Pinterest was reported to be the third most visited social network in the US. According to the tech blog VentureBeat, Pinterest had over 104 million total visits this March (compared to Facebook’s 701 million and Twitter’s 182 million) and 17.8 million unique visitors in February.

Combining Facebook and Pinterest

According to Dror Yaffe, Bazaart co-founder, the idea for Pinvolve came from his team’s own need to market their content on Pinterest. In an interview with TechCrunch, Yaffe said: “We’ve been marketing our applications on Facebook and Twitter, but when Pinterest became a major player we were baffled.” Yaffe added that “as a young startup, our resources are very limited and it takes a lot of effort to market on another social network. So, as a side project, we’ve developed Pinvolve.”

Despite minor marketing efforts, the app has been installed on over 1,000 Facebook Pages and re-pins were increased by over 150 percent, Yaffe added.

The basic version is available for free with a “Get Pinvolve Now” button that appears in the page. Removing it (and getting a “white label” product), adding a customized “like” button and redirecting to your Pinterest profile costs $9.99, a price that later will increase to $19.99.