Can Pinterest interest more men with its new filter?
Pinterest has announced a special filter for its search engine that separates content on the basis of gender and that is aimed at attracting more men to the collection and sharing tool. Growing numbers of men are beginning to use the service, but still some 71 of visitors to its site are women, which has created a feminine bias that is reflected in the internal search results.
The new function, which allows for many searches to be divided on the basis of masculine or feminine preferences, is the responsibility of David Rubin, who has just joined the company, and the man responsible for the marketing campaign for male deodorant Axe, one of the most sexualized products in recent times.
Pinterest’s bias is not the result of any attempt on its part to attract female users, and instead simply reflects social factors, and supposedly, women’s affinity for the visual, and for their more sophisticated use of the service to store images. Similarly, it would appear that in general, men tend to have far fewer boards and to use the application much less than women do.
I use Pinterest to store content: a click on my tool bar allows me to archive news items that I find during the course of my daily reading, which I can then search for when I need them for anything I am writing about.
What’s more, I only use four boards: the main one, Technology readings, has almost three thousand users, mostly in the United States (I tend to select news from English-language sources), more than 55 percent of whom are women, a result of the app’s feminine bias, no doubt. On Flipboard, my Technology readings is much more popular, with some 6,400 users.
That said, while Flipboard provides elegant visuals and is very comfortable for the casual reader, I only use it as a way of recycling and putting my daily reading to use by making it available to others, but not for myself. Instead, for my work, I use Pinterest to store my news.
I have begun to notice that growing numbers of companies are now using Flipboard to edit magazines for either internal consumption or to gather interesting reading material, or subject matter related to their area of activity. For the moment, I have not seen Pinterest put to corporate use in this way, even though it has more grouping, classification, search and comment functions. We will have to see if this kind of use that is less focused on gender and more so on the idea of storing material begins to spread.
(En español, aquí)
