Pinterest is a social media site focused on sharing images called pins into collections called boards.
Pinterest, Inc. is a social media web and mobile application company. It operates a software system designed to enable discovery of information on the World Wide Web using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp. Pinterest has reached 291 million monthly active users as of May 2019.
Pinterest, Wikipedia
Demographics on Pinterest
As a whole, Pinterest is strongly favoured by female users. In a report, sproutsocial.com stated that 61% of pinners have made a purchase after seeing a product on Pinterest.
Pinterest claims that 98% of users have tried something new after seeing it on the site; 84% use Pinterest when trying to decide what to buy; 77% have found a new brand or product on the site.
According to a Hootsuite study, households with higher incomes and higher levels of education are twice as likely as others to use Pinterest.
This strongly suggests that if you are looking for an international audience of women readers, this might well be the social media platform for you. However, to take full advantage of this you will need to be a visual storyteller. Reach for that camera and say, “cheese”.
With numbers like that, a book with a good aesthetic for the cover might do very well on the platform.
What do people use Pinterest for?
People on Pinterest are here to take action. They browse their feeds for inspiration, search for topics they’re interested in and click on Pins to learn more. Your content fits right in, and helps people decide what to try next. In fact, 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins they saw from brands.
Why Pinterest ads work
One study showed that men account for only 7% of total pins and that Millennials use Pinterest as much as Instagram.
But Pinterest doesn’t have the scandals or the congressional hearings. It bills itself as the platform where people reconnect with themselves, not shouting politicians (or relatives shouting about politicians). Pinterest is for you. And your ideal vision of a future self.
Incidentally, Pinterest is also the search engine where you find the things you need to buy in order to become that ideal self.
In other words, Pinterest users are planning for the future, which means they’re in discovery mode. And the numbers show that these folks engage with branded content because they actively appreciate it.
Hootsuite, 23 Pinterest Statistics That Matter to Marketers in 2019
Users click through to shopping sites more than Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter users.
This is far from a definitive figure. Another study I found indicated that product discovery per platform was somewhat different.
Planning your pins
When it comes to planning your content the creative minds behind Pinterest have you covered. They have produced a report which looks at interest spikes during the year and presented it as a lovely, easy to read chart.
As you can see, certain topics are deeply seasonal. By planning for this, you can plan season-appropriate content that is highly likely to get repinned (shared) at different times of the year.
If these interests spikes are reflective of wider interests on social media generally, then this may be a good starting point for planning content for your blog and other social media channels too.