Hi, I’m Praneeth Kumar.
In this blog you will learn 10 reasons why do people use Pinterest over other social media platforms.
Each reason is backed with relevant facts so they are not randomly selected or my opinions.
Without further ado let’s get started.
Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog post.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a visual imagery search engine, to say simply, it is a perfect mixture of Google and Instagram.
In the name itself, Pinterest is a combination of 2 words, Pin+Interest
The pin is either a vertical image or video and you can upload it on the platform based on your interests.
Each pin lets you the opportunity to connect to an external source like a website or online store with a hyperlink, here pins act like the cover of the books like images and first impressions for the website content or online store product.
Why do people use Pinterest?
Here are 10 main reasons why people use Pinterest over most other social media platforms, here is a quick overview of the reasons.
- Inspiration and ideas.
- For Shopping.
- To connect with others.
- Promote their brand.
- Drive traffic and do affiliate marketing/Make money.
- Read articles.
- To Bookmarks.
- To Relax.
- Less competitive platform.
- Others use it too.
Let’s see the reasons in detail,
Note: the following reasons are filled with lots of facts and statistics, I have gathered all of those data from the following sources,
Because I used data in every reason, it is hard to link to individual stats all the time as a source so I wanted to mention it here quickly.
Now let’s see what are the 10 main reasons why people use Pinterest a lot.
-
For inspiration and ideas.
One of the main reasons why people use Pinterest is because to find inspiration and ideas.
Like it is no surprise that quotes, DIY crafts, women fashion, home decoration, health and fitness and cooking recipes are one of the popular genres of Pinterest.
Whenever people have some need of inspiration or are looking for some ideas and thoughts on what they can for example while looking for some home decor ideas, they visit Pinterest,
They just make an instant search on Pinterest to look for some similar ideas and get inspired from them.
Because of which the facts is that,
- There are over 2 billion Pinterest searches that happen on the platform every month with an average user typing 8 searches for a month.
- The average user spends 14 minutes on the Platform every day.
Pinterest is a great visual search engine.
-
For shopping purposes.
This is again a huge reason why people use Pinterest,
Don’t believe me, take a look at the stats then,
- 83% purchase after seeing a brand’s content or pins on Pinterest.
- More than 25% time spent on Pinterest is spent shopping.
- 89% of users are on Pinterest for purchase inspiration.
- 98% of users said they have tried something new that they have found on Pinterest.
- 77% of Weekly pinners have discovered new products or brands. Users of Pinterest have said that content from Pinterest pins and ads are useful.
Shopping or finding the products that people can buy is one of the huge reasons why people use Pinterest so heavily.
Because of the fact that every pin or image that you can upload on the Pinterest you can actually link back to a particular website on the internet from that pin so,
It makes people to easily find more information about images which they found very interesting in while searching on Pinterest.
For example, you can search any product you want on the platform and you can see some beautiful images of that product as Pinterest is a visual search engine,
people scroll through the pins to find the best image that looks pretty and visit the website to buy the product.
-
To connect with others.
Even though pinterest is a visual search engine just like Google, people use Pinterest as a social media site as well,
Even the platform provides lots of features to make it a social media like,
- Saves and bookmarks of pins.
- Sharing of pins.
- Follow of their favourite Pinterest accounts.
- Comments section for pins.
- Report of pins.
- Recommended pins for each pin for scrolling.
- Sending and receiving messages.
This is the reason why apart from being a visual search engine,
Pinterest is also a,
- Pinterest is among top 5 popular social media platforms in USA.
- Pinterest is also accounted in top 7 social media platforms in the world.
Overall, people use Pinterest like more of a social media platform than a visual search engine.
-
To Bookmarks.
The main reason why Pinterest is a social media platform is that,
It is a great bookmarking website on the internet.
Most people don’t use Pinterest for commenting or messaging their friends,
They use Pinterest as I said earlier to find inspiration and ideas and save those ideas to their accounts so that they can visit them often.
Pinterest allows you to save all of your ideas or pins that you have searched for at one place called boards in your account and you can make them either public or private.
And the best thing about this is for example, you like a board of pins of other accounts which is made public and want to get those pins in your feed but don’t like the creator,
You can follow individual boards and get those pins in your feed of which you followed not the entire account of the creator which is not the case with other social media platforms like,
Instagram where you can only follow the entire creator account not individual feeds to get those updates.
This is what makes Pinterest unique.
You can also create your own boards and organise different pins you found on the platform in different boards so that you can easily access them in the future.
-
To make money.
Many bloggers and digital marketers use Pinterest because of the fact that,
Every pin that they can upload on the platform, they can actually link back to any one of the website on the internet.
This is amazing when you think about it,
Well, you might be wondering, we can do it in Facebook as well nah,
Yes you can post and share links on Facebook but why Pinterest is great because,
- The average life span of the Pinterest pin is 3.5 months whereas 5 hours on Facebook and 48 hours on LinkedIn for a normal post.
- An average a single pin can drive 6-page visits and 11 repins.
Because of which there are many blogger and digital marketers who drive more than 80% of their traffic from Pinterest pins,
And just like Google, don’t forget Pinterest is a search engine for images and those images are linked with blog posts or individual websites on the internet.
And there are many people who make money from Pinterest pins by affiliate marketing without starting a website by attaching pins with affiliate products and shopping as we know is huge thing in Pinterest.
These are the reasons why people use Pinterest for making money.
-
Read articles.
This is another reason why people use pinterest,
Because Pinterest is as I said a visual search engine,
People search for ideas and blog topics and read articles as a matter of fact,
- The fact is that about 39 % of the female pinners and 48% of male users prefer Pinterest search engine over Google & Bing to search for things.
Just like Google, you also have autosuggestions of Keywords in Pinterest that makes it a great tool to find keywords that bloggers can use to rank high on Pinterest search.
-
Promote their brand.
Look, Pinterest is a huge platform which is growing every year.
Currently the platform has over 460 million monthly users and is growing worldwide.
The platform is also huge for promoting brands because of the following things,
- 97% of all Pinterest searches are non branded.
- Revenue from shopping ads grew 100% last year on the platform.
- 60% of Pinterest users are women.
- Pinterest is growing in younger generations.
- 80% of U.S. Millennial women and 40% of Millennial men use the platform.
- Pinterest generated nearly 1.4 billion dollars in advertising in 2020.
- Pinterest ads are 2.3x cheaper per conversion than other social media ads.
Because of all these amazing facts about Pinterest, Pinterest ads is one of the best platform for promoting a brand.
It is clearly one of the best platforms for marketing and promotion of brands and also because the chances of getting new brands visibility is high because,
- 98% of Pinterest users have tried something which they have seen on the Platform.
- 97% searches on Pinterest are not brand related.
Pinterest business account gives access to lots of analytics and data where you can keep track of all of your efforts right from one place and use tools like tailwind tribe to automate work on Pinterest and promote your business unlike other platforms.
And Pinterest is better for promoting brands compared to other marketing channels like Facebook ads,
because as soon as you stop paying for the platform on Facebook, your paid reach will stop but on Pinterest,
you will continue getting more repins and shares of your pins even if you stop investing Money.
This is also one of the reasons why people use Pinterest for marketing their brand mainly products which are related to women because majority of users are women.
-
To Relax.
Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr,
Pinterest is even though it is also a social media platform,
Mainly people like to visit the platform for relaxation.
You won’t have any negative emotions and feelings while using this platform compared to other platforms like Instagram,
There are 2 main reasons,
- It is alot about visuals and images which are good and appealing for eyes compared to text.
- It is highly strict in its guidelines and standards, with no harmful and bad content.
Pinterest cleary states in its guidelines that,
Pinterest isn’t a place for antagonistic, explicit, false or misleading, harmful, hateful, or violent content or behavior.
And,
We may remove, limit, or block the distribution of such content and the accounts, individuals, groups and domains that create or spread it based on how much harm it poses.
This is one of the huge reasons why,
- 91% of people say that Pinterest is a place of positivity.
- Nine out of ten Pinners described Pinterest as filled with positivity
In the world full of social media giants like Facebook, Instagram which are huge reasons for so many mental problems in people’s lives like anxiety and depression,
Pinterest is actually helping people positively by inspiring them.
Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, likes, followers and comments do not really affect your Pinterest platform.
Because Pinterest is more of a social media bookmark site.
-
Less competitive platform.
Unlike other social media platforms,
Pinterest is a less competitive platform compared to other platforms.
According to social media writing, 80% of pins on Pinterest are repins which can be seen in 2 ways,
- This shows that Pinterest has a large percentage of getting content going viral unlike other platforms.
- Because a large percentage of users only use repins or saves the viral pins, very small percentage of people upload new pins and content on the platform.
This is the reason why Pinterest platform supports all those accounts that upload new content on the platform as unlike Google which gives more boost for accounts and websites which are old,
Pinterest helps new accounts by boosting them in its algorithms which uploads content every day because
Others are mostly repinning or saving the existing pins but not adding any new unique value to the Pinterest audience.
Compared to other social media platforms,
Pinterest is a less competitive platform and unlike other platforms, Pinterest is great because it has majority of audience dominated by women and young people unlike other sites.
-
Others use it too.
It might look weird reason but it is true,
Many people try things and products and buy them not because they have any good reason to buy it but because they see others using it too.
This is called social proof.
- Over 80% of US moms use Pinterest.
- Pinterest is growing in younger generations
Because a large percentage of women’s use the platform, it goes subconsciously to other womens that they get influenced to start using the platform.
Ending remarks.
There you go these are all the reasons why people use Pinterest in their daily life.
Do comment down what do you think why do people use Pinterest over other social media channels.
Share the blog post with your family and friends to let them know about this amazing social media platform.
Sharing is caring.
Read my other blogs,
- Pros and cons of using Pinterest.
- Social media Vs Blogging, which is the best and why?
- How to start a blog on WordPress?
I will catch you next time till then,
Keep learning and keep growing.