Social media sites are offering new ways to help brands and businesses with marketing.

YouTube is now helping brands promote their products by offering “shoppable video.” According to them, four in ten shoppers visited a store online or in person as a direct result of watching a video and together with marketers have worked to bring these two actions closer together. In new videos, each time a “buyable” item appears on screen, a link appears over it which guides viewers to a page where they may purchase the product. Through these shoppable videos marketers are looking to take advantage of consumers’ desires to purchase items seen in a video. While only used by a few brands at this time, this technology will most likely grow rapidly and make YouTube an even stronger marketing tool.

Pinterest is also becoming more brand-friendly. Following in other social sites’ footsteps, the content “pinning” service just launched special business-only pages. Though this new type of page does not yet look any different than regular pages, Pinterest has streamlined the registration process and altered the terms of service to officially allow commercial use of the social site while also working to add more tools and features to these pages soon. These efforts are clearly designed to encourage companies to make use of the sharing platform as consumer adoption continues to skyrocket.

Is your company looking for new ways to utilize social media and other online platforms? ARTÉMIA is here to help you navigate the ever-changing currents of the digital marketplace.