Pinterest is becoming the latest social network who is adding sponsored, or as they call them, Promoted Pins, to their boards. Twitter has started promoting tweets and Facebook has its sponsored posts and now Pinterest is running Promoted Pins in Beta and is expected to launch the feature to advertisers at the beginning of 2015. This means that January 1 is also when you’re going to start seeing Promoted Pins.

Pinterest has around 70 million users, and while it may not be as large as Facebook or Twitter, it still makes a very promising advertising platform. As is expected, Pinterest is trying their best to make this feature as user-friendly as possible and to sugar-coat it as much they can. They wrote on their blog:

“At Pinterest, our mission is to help people discover things they love and do those things in real life. Millions of people use Pinterest every day to save the inspiration and things they need to carry out plans and pursue their interests. This is a huge, unmatched opportunity for marketers today—while some platforms look to the past or present, only Pinterest focuses on the future.”

The Promoted Pins feature was launched in Beta eight months ago for advertisers. Pinterest announced that the feature will be open to all of their U.S.-based partners starting January 1.

Pinterest also shared with the world a few things that they learned from the beta version of Promoted Pins. Apparently, Promoted Pins perform just as well and sometimes even better than the organic pins. According to Pinterest, brand advertisers achieved a 30% bump in earned media from their campaigns with Promoted Pins! Promoted Pins get repined around 11 times, which is the same as organic ones.

Another thing Pinterest has revealed happens with Promoted Pins is that they perform long after a campaign ends, which, when you think about it, makes sense as Pins don’t have an expiration date and can get repinned forever.

Also, it seems that auction-based Promoted Pins are quite successful, but Pinterest revealed it they are still working on this feature and want to make sure we get it right before we roll it out to all businesses.

So, what exactly does this mean for the Pinterest user? To be honest, we expect to see more pictures of brand names mixed in the lot. That nice, juicy hamburger you’ve been searching for on Pinterest, well, it’s going to come to you, but with it so will some brand name burgers.

Aside from Promoted Pins, Pinterest is also launching The Pinstitute, which is a place where advertisers learn how to connect with Pinners and make their presence less obvious. If this sounds like analytics and feedback, it’s because that’s what it is, under a different name. We welcome this, because we feel that it anything that is going to keep our boards nice and clean is a good thing.

What are your thoughts on Pinterest introducing Promoted Pins?