Pinterest User Guide
By: Emma Stevens, Olivia Scott, and Katie Assael
For those of you who do not know what Pinterest is or how it works, we’re here to help explain that. Pinterest is a social network that allows users to visually share and discover new interests by “pinning” those interests to a board you create, and then browsing what others have pinned as well.
Step 1: Go to https://www.pinterest.com or download the Pinterest app and begin to create an account.
It will then take you to this screen to help you set up your profile and ask you what some of your interests are so it can generate some topics that might seem like something you would “pin”. This it to help get ideas flowing as to what you would want to use this platform for. This platform can be used as a professional business site, or a personal branding platform for your friends and family to see.
Step 2: You can also search for whatever you would like in the search bar and a screen like this will appear:
You can then click on whatever you would like and in the corner and a red button with a pin on it that says “save” will appear in the corner.
Step 3: You can press that and pin it to a board that you personally create.
Then name the board whatever you prefer and click create. Once you do that it will automatically pin it to your board on your profile! Then you can start following other people or companies and their pinned boards will show up on your feed and you can pin those for your followers as well. There is a messaging button too, so people can get in contact with one another through this app as well. Pinterest is known to be a lifestyle app but it is also used for news and politics, the problem is not a lot of people realize that.
Demographics:
Pinterest is mostly used by women from ages 25–54 and 83% of people use it for life moments. Also 50% of users are millennials, so it might be time for Pinterest to start catering the news for more of a millennial viewership. That way people can start taking the news from Pinterest more seriously. Some of the top topics are art and home style, which might sound like something a female would be more drawn to, the first step for the news to be more prominent on Pinterest would be gaining a larger male population. We will talk about that more down below.
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/pinterest-statistics/
News Organizations Using Pinterest:
Our group was surprised by how many prominent new sites and newspapers used Pinterest. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue and more all have Pinterest boards. The question is, How do they use it? And why?
The first target for our research was the New York Times. The New York Times is a well established new site and paper with a loyal fan base. As Pinterest continues to reach more audiences, The New York Times jumped on the opportunity to join. The New York Times primarily uses Pinterest board to share their content.
This is a screen-shot of their homepage. The New York Times has a substantial rate of monthly viewers and an active following. As you can see, consumers have access to an overview of the New York Times page, access to their boards, pins, activity, followers and following.
Once the user clicks boards they have access to all New York Times branded and edited boards. The New York Times has their personal label for each board they create. The boards are used primarily for access to articles and the New York Times website.
Here is New York Times college education board. As a user you can click on any of the images. When you click on an image you are given access to a link to the article of your interest. All you have to do is press view.
Now Pinterest users can be active New York Time consumers as well. All you need is a Pinterest account. One thing to note, the last board was produced 9 month ago. The material produced does not appear to have the same consistency as other New York Times social platforms.
The New York Times has a platform strictly for News and politics. The audience and content is widely diverse.
The Wall Street Journal is more active on Pinterest. The Wall Street Journal emphasized branding and self promotion on Pinterest. Their boards are cohesive and representative of their original layout.
The Wall Street Journal follows the same layout as The New York Times. The company produces boards that highlight their brand and use images to draw in viewers. This produces traffic for the companies website and stories.
Vogue magazine takes more of an artistic approach. Vogue emphasized the visual side of Pinterest. This aligns with their brand and content well. Vogue used Pinterest as a platform to highlight released magazines, interviews and their news content.
They have substantially more followers than other prominent news stories. We believe this is because of their creative use of the platform and the demographic of Pinterest.
Vogue can also check their personal activity. For example, who has pinned their material. This helps the company understand what consumers are engaging with.
One trend we noticed was the change in material. Many of the News sources began using Pinterest a couple years ago. The content produced was primarily lifestyle inspired.
As time went on and Pinterest grew as a company the content expanded as well. In the last couple of years all of the primary news sources added more content. For example, one board will be centered around climate change, and another will be summer barbecue ideas. This expansion is critical for Pinterest to expand their own personal branding and demographic.
Lastly, although many news sources are using this platform content can be sparse. For example CNN has an account. The last post was four years ago.
Improvements of news on Pinterest:
We believe that the Pinterest is a unique and interesting way to advertise. With 81% of their users being women, more specifically young and educated women, it is clear to see how they have catered to that demographic. What sets Pinterest aside is its format that can create advertisements that don’t necessarily look like advertisements. As we have seen, companies can build their brands and post insightful content that they couldn’t do so on other platforms. They can represent themselves in a way that is more approachable and useful. By linking articles to images, users will click it even if they had no interest in reading the article because they liked the picture and searched for things relating to it. Pinterest is also unique because it appears to be substantially more productive than other social media websites, as people use it for inspiration and growth. Users feel they are self-improving rather than wasting time because they use it to organize and plan. Because of this, users are likely to spend longer amounts of time on Pinterest then any other social media. Although Pinterest is primarily used by women, 40 percent of new users are men according to their website.This is huge for companies. Pinterest content is dominated by things that would typically appear to women, like fashion, lifestyle, etc. Although brands are using Pinterest well, they need to appeal to the new male following in order to interest them and really sell their brand. By catering to the male audience and diving into seeing what is the biggest interests to men, that could help improve this problem.
https://newsroom.pinterest.com/en/post/150-million-people-finding-ideas-on-pinterest
Overall, Pinterest is a good way for news to be shared, but the website itself is still developing the best way to monetize its user base. They have less ad revenue than other social networks but they are expected to grow over 40 percent this year. This proves that more people are discovering new brands on Pinterest than ever, and once brands dedicate time to the website, they will see growth in new readers. Newsrooms could improve by posting more consistently. Newsrooms need to keep in mind that consistent, high quality content is necessary for engagement and traffick to their website. For example, BBC posted quotes and not very appealing photos. Their engagement is low, and their content is sparse.
BBC monthly views are significantly lower than the newsroom shown above. We believe this is due to the lack of content, quality and consistency.
Finally, we also found that a lot of high end brands specifically use Pinterest to target consumers who they know will purchase their products. More than a quarter of the people on Pinterest have a household income of $150,000 or more and these people are more likely to shop at luxury retailers than people not on the platform. 57% of users on Pinterest are also millennials, and millennials today make up the largest population of luxury shoppers in the US.
250 million people use Pinterest each month. 98% have tried something new they found from Pinterest, 84% of people use it when trying to decide to buy something, and 77% of users have found a new product to use. With this insane amount of people using Pinterest for so many different aspects, it would be great to see the number of people using Pinterest for the news go up. It can be a great resource and easy way to access the news from a new perspective.
