Businesses large and small as well as nonprofits, individuals and even towns are increasingly turning to Pinterest to round off their social media presence. Its not a bad idea, Pinterest is incredibly popular and many have used it quite successfully in driving traffic to their websites but what people are on Pinterest anyway and what do they like about it, when do they pin and what brands are dominating the Pinterest space? All very good questions. At MarketingModo we firmly believe that businesses should tailor their social strategies both to the target clientele they are trying to reach as well as the top groups on a particular social channel. For example, sells insurance policies may not do well promoting to Facebook”s population unless they gear themselves to insurance policies that those on Facebook might be interested in. Pinterest should be handled the same way but in order to do so, you need to know what kind of people are on Pinterest and thanks to a new study, now we know!
Since launching its new guided search function, Pinterest is quickly becoming a discovery platform. In fact, it is within the realm of possibility that Pinterest could become a major e-commerce player and potentially challenge Google on product search. This is what the folks over at RJMetrics are saying. RJMrecently ran a study of 50,000 random pinners and their pins to see how people are using Pinterest. This is what they found:
1. Women Out-Pin Men
According to the study, women make up roughly 80 percent of people on Pinterest and women are responsible for posting 92 percent of all pins on the site.Men on the other hand are responsible for a paltry 8% of pins and that has been on a steady decline from a high of 13% three years ago. So if you are developing a Pinterest marketing strategy, please keep the ladies in mind.
2. What Do Women Find Pinteresting? (Sorry, we just had to throw that in there)
On average, female Pinterest users are posting an average of 158 pins. The top categories for these pins include:
- Food & Drink
- DIY & Crafts
- Home Décor
- Holidays & Events
- Hair & Beauty
- Women”s Fashion
- Design
- Kids
- Art
- Weddings
- Travel
- Gardening
- Photography
- Film, Music, & Books
- Health & Fitness
- Education
- Humor
- Products
- Animals
- Outdoors
What this tells you is essentially the topics that these Pinterest users want and any good marketer knows to give the people what they want. While your business may not be in these particular areas you can still leverage this data by developing content for Pinterest that incorporates these elements. One client of MarketingModo is a perfect example of this. This particular client is an ecommerce business that sells musical instruments. As you can see musical instruments are not on the list but using the top trends in Pinterest we were able to work with this client on developing pin worthy content. In this case, the client made use of the potluck lunches that they host for their employees every week and used that relatively simple event to start posting photos of the food that the employees cooked. The Food & drink category is extremely popular as seen above but what made this interesting is that they tied the food and drink to their business with cute names such as clarinet chowder, saxophone salsa, musical minestrone, names that would appeal to those with a musical inclination while also appealing to those searching for that particular category . Even today they still receive calls from people who heard about them because of “clarinet chowder”.
3. Which Domains Rule The Roost At Pinterest?
Brands using Pinterest also benefit from the fact that each pin can link to a specific URL. This is great for driving traffic back to your site. When RJMetrics weeded out the user-generated content sites like Tumblr and Blogspot, the top domains ranked by number of repins include:
- Etsy.com
- Urbanoutfitters.com
- Williams-sonoma.com
- Westelm.com
- Reykjavikcornerstore.com
- Poketo.com
- Brides.com
- Plowhearth.com
- Screened.com
- Academy.com
- Ae.com
Etsy is the clear winner of the number of repins by site. Surprisingly enough, only 8% of the total pins are coming directly from Etsy itself. A whopping 67 percent are pinned using the Pinterest bookmarklet so remember when you are creating content for Pinterest to write great description using your keywords and then even for content not being developed for Pinterest remember to include alt tags and descriptive text so that it can show up in image searches on top browsers. make everything “pinable”
4. Prime Pinning Time
Yes, there are clear trends in the types of pins that users are sharing especially in regards to seasonality. Holiday-related pins begin taking an upward spike in August, gardening and landscaping pins start in December, and health and fitness trends begin moving up in the early part of the year (Hello New Year”s resolutions!).
The chart below displays prime pinning by hour during the day. Pins begin increasing throughout the day, with a final spike in the evening.
Where Does Pinterest go From Here?
With the addition of the Guided Search feature, Pinterest is staking its claim on the search market – though don”t expect Pinterest to directly challenge Google, at least not yet.
BuzzFeed reported earlier this week that Jason Wilson led the charge on Pinterest”s new search functionality and that it was largely built on the idea of shifting away from text-based search engines. This evolution leaves much more room for discovery than Pinterest”s previous capabilities.
Don”t forget, for businesses interested in expanding or build a Pinterest presence, MarketingModo currently offer setup as well as day to day management of all major social media channels including Pinterest!