If you’re trying to get more creative, whether it’s looking for a healthy recipe or home redecorating ideas, Pinterest is the place to go. When a user finds something of interest to them, they “pin” it to a board and can have a permanent reminder of it. Pinning is an aspirational activity, meaning when a user pins, he or she is making a statement “I want this.” Because of this, data on Pinterest is data on user aspirations and RJMetrics decided to take advantage of that to study user engagement, aspirations and look into Pinterest’s future.
RJMetrics explored 50,000 random Pinterest users with public profiles and their pins. They were able to use the information they collected to make conclusion about who is using Pinterest, what and when they are pinning, and where Pinterest is headed.
Who is using Pinterest?
It is a pretty well known fact that Pinterest is dominated by the female gender, but exactly how many users are women? RJMetrics measured that 80% of Pinterest users are female and only 20% are male. Moreover, female Pinterest users are more active than their male counterparts, with 92% of all pins made by women.
To compare data from Pinterest’s start to now, RJMetrics used the first reliable data, which was released in the year following the site’s foundation in 2010. The data shows that male user activity has actually been steadily decreasing since July 2011. At Pinterest’s birth, male users were pinning at about 13%, compared to its 6% now. On the other hand, women pinner activity has increased from 87% to 94% in just 3 years, indicating that women pin 15 more times than men do. The average female Pinterest user from the past year has actually made 158 pins.
What is being pinned?
The most popular categories on Pinterest are Food and Drink with 20% of pins from that category, then DIY & Crafts with 12% and Home Decor with 11%. The next most popular categories are Holidays & Events and Hair & Beauty.
This data is especially significant for the top trending brands on Pinterest, like Etsy, Urban Outfitters and William Sonoma. RJMetrics measured the top brands by looking at the URLs attached to each pin, focusing on non-user-generated content sites like Tumblr and Flickr. Etsy is dominating Pinterest with 67% of Etsy pins coming from the Pinterest bookmarklet and 8% from its on-site Pin It button. The heavy use of the Pinterest bookmarklet over the site’s button demonstrates that Etsy’s reign stems from the fact that its products strongly align with user aspirations. Other brands doing well on Pinterest have heavily followed boards, like Lowe’s who has the most followed board with 3.4 million followers.
When are users pinning?
Pinners most often pin during the later hours of the day, with activity increasing from morning until night. 32% of pinning occurs during the work day between 10am – 4pm and 18% ooccurs in the evening from 9pm to midnight. Unlike other social network activity, Pinterest traffic does not dip after 3pm like that of Facebook and Twitter. This trend is consistent across the aforementioned top five categories in Pinterest.
The Future of Pinterest
Four years after its Launch, Pinterest is still doing well for itself. Although most of its active user base is female, 84% of those females are still using the site four years later and even pin more each year after signing up.
This data shows very strong user retention rates and hints to the reasons behind a company valuation of a whopping $3.8 billion. With numbers like that, the future of Pinterest looks bright.
Featured image by mkhmarketing / CC BY 2.0
