General Information
Pinterest is a personalized social media platform that
offers a “visual bookmark tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.”
It is comparable to a real life bulletin board. Instead of cutting pictures of
things you like out of a magazine and putting the picture onto a physical bulletin
board, you are searching online and “pin” an image to your Pinterest page. A
pin is a picture which has a link embedded in the picture so when the image is
selected the link will take the user to the website the image represents. Users
can upload, save, sort, and manage their pins (pin=picture with link in it) through
“pinboards” or just “boards”. Boards are collections of images users pin that
are organized by a central topic or theme. For example, I have a pinboard
titled watches where all the pins of watches I like can be found. Your “Pinterest
Page” is a collection of all your pinboards. So, a Pinterest page holds a user’s
personalized group of pinboards, and the pinboards hold all of the images the
user wants to save.
Users find images to pin on their personal Pinterest page by
browsing generic pinboards the website creates for you or by searching a specific
topic. When a user pins images to their personal board the website is able to
guess about what types of pins a user may like and puts them together for the
user to look through. The group of pins the website guesses a user may like is
called the “pin feed”. The pin feed will also show pins the user’s friends have
pinned and users can send pins to their friends. Content found outside of the Pinterest
website can be uploaded to the user’s board via the "Pin It" button. The
pin it button can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser.
Purpose
You know when you're browsing online and see something you
like and don't want to forget about it? What do you do? You could email it to
yourself, print it out, or bookmark it on your computer. The problem is, each
of those options has drawbacks which ultimately leads to you forgetting what
you wanted to remember. Pinterest solves this problem by providing users a
place to organize and remember those ideas. Pinterest is also self described as
“the world’s catalog of ideas”. The CEO
of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, summarized the purpose of the website is to
provide a "catalog of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and
do that thing."
Use in Business
Pinterest also allows businesses to create pages to promote
their companies online. Pinterest offers services to assist businesses in
creating their own Pinterest page and best practices for operating it. The
Pinterest pages created serve as a "virtual storefront" for a
business. The Social Media Examiner explained how Pinterest helps businesses in
this way, “Pinterest lets brands deliver content in an easily shareable format
that leads to increased visibility and higher traffic numbers.” A study
observing the web traffic on the jewelry and accessories website Boticca.com is
evidence for The Social Media Examiner’s statement. The study occurred in 2012
and compared users coming from Facebook and Pinterest. The study found users from
Pinterest spent less time on the company’s website but spent $180 compared to
$85 spent from users coming from Facebook. A systematic review also completed
in 2012 confirmed the case study’s findings and concluded Pinterest was more
effective at increasing sales than other social media platforms. However, according to a study done by the Pew Research Center in 2015 72% of internet users use Facebook compared to 31% of internet users using
Pinterest and among the users of each respective site Facebook had a frequency
of visits as seen in the graph
Pinterest can also contribute to companies, especially small
companies, get become known. An anecdotal story from my own experience was my
discovery of Etsy. It is group of small stores that typically only have a
presence online and contains homemade products. I discovered the website on
Pinterest and since then I have only gotten my family’s gifts from that site.
The final use of Pinterest in business is to identify trends of customers. By
tracking the way customers pin things, a business could gain insight to what
products are popular, deduce why specific products are popular and use that
information for product development.
Assessment
From a sales perspective there is no question Pinterest is
the most effective social media platform. The studies described above, while older,
offer the first quantitative evidence I have found comparing social media
platform effectiveness. Considering the features of Pinterest vs. Facebook I
believe Pinterest is more effective at increasing sales; because, generally speaking,
a person using Facebook has a different mentality or frame of mind than a
person using Pinterest. Pinterest goers use the site, as Pinterests’ CEO Ben
Silbermann said, to "go out and do that thing". When a person is on
Pinterest the user is more likely to be looking for inspiration to accomplish a
task, which is more likely to lead to a purchase compared to Facebook where users
who are looking to connect with friends. However, there is a social stigma associated
with the use of Pinterest. The belief is that using Pinterest is only for women
and men use the site their masculinity questioned. I believe this stigma
greatly limits the total number of Pinterest users and narrows the
effectiveness to businesses catering to women.
My Experience
I am figuratively in love with Pinterest. The site simple to navigate and for me it is far more addicting to use than any other social media platform. As presented above, there is a stigma around the site as being predominately used by women for recipes, event planning, and decorating; however, I reject that perception. I have 21 difference pinboards on my page and none of them could be considered un-masculine.
My family uses my page as a source for gift ideas and I use
it to store gift ideas I have for them. This makes shopping around birthdays
and holidays much easier and no one ever has any idea what I am getting them as
a gift because I don’t need to have the awkward, “what you want for Christmas?”,
conversation. I also have a pinboard dedicated to each of my hobbies. Each
board serves as a list of what I should do next pertaining to that hobby. Lastly,
I find looking through the memes on Pinterest to be way more fun than using any
other social media platform or visiting any other website on the internet. For example, the meme to the left was related to me today and seeing after my newly washed car got crapped on by was pretty funny.
References
Pinterest Image
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