Finally, there’s a Feature to let you Report or Block someone on Pinterest, and it’s going to change the way Businesses Think about Pinterest Marketing.

We are really glad to see Pinterest releasing their  new block feature today. It’s been a hotly requested feature for quite some time and could significantly reduce spam and improve content quality on the site. Users have complained about irrelevant content in the their feeds, mainly fueled by Community/Contributor Boards that could have hundreds of contributors. This is a big step to combat that issue, and will better position Pinterest to provide a more relevant, hyper-targeted content stream compared to facebook or twitter.

In a company blog post published today, Pinterest software engineer Dannie Chu writes:

Pinterest is all about you and what inspires you. That’s why it’s important that you have control of your Pinterest experience. We’ve always offered basic features to control things like the emails you receive, social networking sites you connect your account with, and the ability to report pins. Today, we’re adding a couple of new features people have requested to give you more control, including the ability to block and report a user and more granular email settings.

Source: blog.pinterest.com

Why is letting someone block on Pinterest so important for brands?  People will now have much more control over the content they see, and this could mean having a slightly lower reach for anything you pin.  However, as a brand or business marketing on Pinterest, this also means that targeting your engagement to the right people will become more important than ever.

Greater control = much more relevant content for users.  

What does more relevant content mean?

• More relevant content means more engagement (people using Pinterest more) and higher levels of engagement (more repins, likes, comments and click-throughs)
• The audience you build will have much stronger connections to you than on any other social networks.  Your fanbase might not be as large, or grow as quickly as on Twitter or Facebook, but each fan will be massively more valuable to you.

Pinterest > Twitter and Facebook

We already know that Pinterest drives about 14x more referrals per user than Twitter and 12.5x more referrals per user than Facebook…

Source: PinLeague keynote presentation at Digital Summit in Atlanta (Click for full presentation)

However, it’s becoming clear that when it comes to overall value per follower, Pinterest has an even larger advantage over Facebook and Twitter, and it will only continue to widen the gap.

Blocking people on Pinterest is pretty simple:

Source: blog.pinterest.com

Click on the small flag icon in the bottom-right corner of someone’s profile information, and then choose to block them.  You also have the option to report this person if they are posting inappropriate content.

What happens when you block someone on Pinterest:

• The other person is NOT automatically notified.  However, they will be notified of the block and see the following message if they try to follow you or interact with your pins.

• The block is mutual -  The person you block will not be able to follow you or interact with your pins, and you will no longer be able to follow them or interact with their pins.
• Automatic Unfollow - If you are already following this person, or they are following you, blocking them will cause you both to automatically unfollow each other.
• Comments Removed - Any previous comments between you and the other person will be automatically removed.
• Repins and Likes are NOT automatically removed - You will no longer be able to repin or like any of each other’s pins from that point forward, but previous repins and likes will remain.  If you want to remove those, you will be able to unlike or delete pins individually.
• In Public Areas only, you might still see their boards and pins:
  • Search results
  • Category Pages
  • Group boards if you are both collaborators