Pinterest looks to increase male user base with search change
Pinterest has announced that it has improved its ‘guided search’ to allow men and women to access gender-based pages, as the social platform looks to increase its appeal to men and its attractiveness to advertisers.
The brand announced on its blog that its latest improvements would allow users to search for posts using a gender filter. This means that if a user looks for items such as a watch, they can now look at men or women’s options specifically.
The platform has been largely used by females so far. According to a Global Web Index social report, 80% of Pinterest users were female by May 2014. With this in mind the latest move by the platform may be in part to create a shift in this lack of balance.
The change in search options may also indicate that the platform is looking to make ad targeting more effective for brands, especially as the news comes after a Forrester report claimed that Pinterest is yet to provide value for marketers as it fails to provide effective targeting services.
Search has been an important tool for advertisers as platforms such as Google and Facebook have improved their search options to allow for better ad targeting in their platforms. Facebook has been said to be creating a richer internal search aimed at improving ad-targeting capabilities for brands.
Pinterest has been working hard to prove its worth for marketers over the past few weeks. The brand’s operations head, Don Faul said that the group is looking to unlock the potential of its intent data and to provide better targeting services for marketers over the course of 2015, during a talk at an AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference on Friday (23 Jan).
According to the article, the pinterest is trying to increase the number of male users by activating a gender filter at searching box. I agree with that this filter would affect male users, but only to existed users, because this could be a strategy making them more comfortable to use Pinterest. I do not think this would work well to increase the number of male users dramatically. This is because of the brand image that people have towards to Pinterest.
As you can see at the higher rate of female users compared to male users, Piterest expanded very well among females. Honestly, I thought it mainly targeted female, and I did not know that it is trying to get male users until I read this article. Also, after I read this article, I asked 5 male friends “what is the Pinterest?” All of
them, surprisingly, had a word “feminine” in common when they explained about
it. Therefore, I believe that it should work on to change the image of Pinterst before it works on a minor change like searching system, if it wants to increase the number of male users.
To get more attentions from males, I think differentiation is the key to bring potential users to Pintrest. Because there are other social networking service that let users upload and share pictures, unless there are specific advantages that only Pinterest can provide, people do not need to start to use it. After more male
users of other service are interested in to use Pinterst, it can keep them by
minor changes to make it more comfortable service to use. Then, people would
shift to Pinterest from other service. Overall, Pinerest should work not only to
keep existed users, but also to bring new users by changing the brand image.