Social Media 101: Pinterest Demographics, Strengths & Weaknesses

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a little different than other sites. Being a massive bulletin board, it was designed to emphasize on the discovery of OTHER people’s content, not necessarily your own.

Demographics Breakdown

• Overwhelmingly female in the US, ages 20-50
• Overwhelmingly male in the UK (there have been a LOT of jokes on the net about the feminist inclinations of the UK male as a result)
• Extremely passionate people in their chosen endeavors, though tends to lean towards things like DIY and hobbies. As such, traffic to linked sites tends to be much higher percentage wise because it’s directly related to their personal passions.

Strengths

• Photos and graphics attract views as opposed to long text dialogs. It’s almost entirely visually based, or the story “1 photo is 1000 words”. In fact, as opposed to posts on Facebook, the pictures ARE the posts.
• Women trust Pinterest more. It’s the 3rd most used platform for women.
• Great for retailers, photographers and designers as is acts like a product catalog due to the high visual content (tons of photos)
• Whatever you pin, and your friends re-pin to their own walls are based on related interests, making it easy to discover the related interests of like-minded people.
• Switching back and forth between topics and themes is easy. For example, say that you keep 2 twitter accounts, one for business and one for pleasure. You would have to switch between them for the tone. In Pinterest, it’s all in the same account and it’s just a matter of switching to another pin.
• Very easy to use. To pin a topic or picture it to your wall account takes seconds.
• Flexible on what to follow. When following another person, you do NOT have to follow all of their pins as well, just on the pin topics you want to. For example, say you want to follow Phil the Butterfly collector accountant. You can follow only his interests in butterflies and never see the accounting info.
• You can create a COMMUNITY board that anyone can pin to.

Weaknesses

• Because it is very much a visual picture platform, the issue in regards to photo rights are front and centre. It’s too easy to use someone else’s materials. As such, Pinterest themselves have SCARED their own clients by issuing legal warnings whenever they found a licensing issue.
• The ease of sharing with others has led to the problem of oversharing. Since people tend to share to like-minded and in the same community as well, it’s not unheard of hundreds of people literally re-sharing the same photo to the SAME hundreds of people over and over. Annoyance factor among users can’t even begin to be measured.

Thank you to Terrence Lo of Dream Communications for writing this as a featured Guest Blogger.