With Pinterest's interesting position somewhere between a social media platform and an image search engine, it is impressive that it can play in both arenas and still remain the 15th largest social media platform in the world.
While the platform's success suggests that it is providing a fair amount of value to its users, one of the ways that businesses and their channels determine the value of any platform in question is by the reach that it can provide. So, exactly how many Pinterest users are there?
In order to pain the full picture of Pinterest's audience in 2022, we are going to dive into the raw statistics and their implications on Pinterest's overall reach, global engagement, and user demographics and behaviors, to help you get a better idea of how many users will apply to your business, specifically, and what kind of value they might bring to the table.
First, let's get a little background on the platform itself.
Just in case you didn't already know, Pinterest is a website and app where people can share photos and videos of things that interest them. Pinterest is especially popular for sharing photos of DIY projects, recipes, fashion, and home decor.
People can create "boards" on Pinterest to organize their pins. For example, someone might have a board for all the recipes they want to try, or maybe a board for ideas for their social media marketing strategy. Check out the example below:
Pinterest also has a search feature that allows users to find pins based on keywords. For example, someone might search for "chocolate cake recipe" or "living room decor." In the example above, I created a board based on my search term "social media marketing."
This is what I was mentioning when I stated that Pinterest is sitting somewhere between a social media platform and a search engine, with the former most resembling the platform's core values.
However, if you want to view Pinterest through the lens of a search engine, you can consider your profile as your site, boards as your pages, and your pins as your product pages, where the most information about whatever point you are trying to make to your audience is packed.
All in all, it's a great platform for people to get creative ideas and learn about new things that people, or businesses, come up with.
Pinterest is a social media platform with over 430 million monthly active users. That being said, Pinterest's user base has been depleting by 5% on a year over year basis, following its rapid growth during the pandemic.
This makes sense when you think about the nature of the platform: people come here to find ideas for their DIY projects, and the pandemic lockdowns definitely played a part in driving people to finally do some remodeling.
The majority of Pinterest users are from the United States, followed by Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and France. This just goes to show that Pinterest is gaining popularity in countries where English is not the primary language.
In 2018, Pinterest saw the biggest growth in Brazil, followed by India, France, and Germany, which pushed countries like Canada and the United Kingdom further down the list in terms of total MAUs.
However, what is important to add to this metric is the total penetration that Pinterest has across its global reach. Currently, the US is still Pinterest's highest-penetrated market around the globe, followed closely by Netherlands, Canada, and Belgium, with the European states known for their high fluency rates in English.
Conversely, Brazil, Pinterest's second largest market in terms of total users, is 17th in terms of the overall market penetration, amounting to just 15% of the market.
When it comes to a social platform, it is very important to know how popular a platform is within a certain market: if you were planning on targeting Brasilians, there sure are a lot of them on the platform, however, a 15% market penetration would suggest that there is only a certain faction of Brasilians who are using the app.
In this case, your quest for your target audience would require a little more digging in order to know if it is worth investing the time and money into your business's Pinterest account.
For that, you really need to understand who the Pinterest users that you can expect to find are: what defines them.
While you will be able to gather from the previous section that Pinterest users are quite often found in high concentration throughout the US and other English-affluent markets, it will do you well to know a bit more about the user base's demographic makeup: this is where Pinterest users become really interesting.
Currently, women are dominating the Pinterest user base, but not by much, and that mix might be changing pretty quickly. Male users are up 40% year over year, and they are largely looking for inspiration related to a pretty specific list of post-pandemic goals.
Much of this can be attributed to the age group 25-34, coming in at over 37% of their global audience. However, it should be noted that Gen Z is now adopting this platform at a bit of a faster rate than Millennials, with the former growing at 40% year over year, and the latter at 35%.
How many Pinterest users are there that can be considered 'high value?' While Pinterest's audience largely lives off a salary of $25K-$75K, Pinterest still seems to really attract those with a bit more to spend.
Perhaps it is the fact that the platform is used to find creative and innovative ideas that take some investment, but Pinterest is also used in 45% of all US households with income exceeding $100K.
What does this translate to for your sales? Pinterest's general appeal to a more affluent audience brings the average order value (AOV) for traffic originating from Pinterest to around $50; higher than any other social platform.
Pinterest is a social media platform that allows users to share images and videos. It is most commonly used for things like DIY projects, recipes, and home décor.
The appeal for Pinterest users is the ability to find new ideas, and that comes with a lot of implications on how your company will have to present itself on the platform.
85% of Pinterest users use the platform as inspiration for their new projects. That's over 368 million people who are simply looking for novel ways to use products to acheive their lifestyle goals, whether those be in fashion, home decor: you name it, they're looking for the best way for them to do it.
While you'll have a lot of users looking for products that cna be used to complete their vision, you'll find that they aren't looking fo a brand to fill that gap: they are going straight for the products or overall designs.
So how many Pinterest users are there using branded searches? Around 3% of searches in the top Pinterest search categories are branded. That is very low, and this goes back to the idea that Pinterest users are looking for ideas and inspiration when they arrive.
If you were expecting a Google-like experience, where you can find your repeat customers and previous ad viewers searching for your brand, Pinterest is going to behave much more like a social network.
The concept of Pinterest boards makes it very easy for users to save content (pins) where they can reengage with it every time they open a board. So, how many pins are users saving?
It turns out that there have been 240 billion saved pins, working out to 528 saves per MAU! While that is impressive, it should be noted that, on average, a unique pin is repinned 11 times throughout its lifecycle, and that includes all of the users who don't have a creative team behind their pins.
If you are concerned with advertising to the relatively small volume of users that Pinterest offers outside of the social media giants like Facebook and Instagram, there are unique ways that you can use to get the most out of the Pinterest's self-serve advertising platform, and some interesting statistics on how users respond to ads on the network which might inspire you.
If you were planning on uploading your product photos for your Pinterest Ads, definitely throw that notion out the window. Lifestyle images have a 32% higher CTR over product photos, which ties back to the idea that users are looking for items that complete their vision for a better lifestyle.
Pinterest users love using the platform to design their vision for each season or even specific moments in their daily lives, so pins that include some form of content referencing those moments get 10X awareness.
It doesn't really matter how truly "new" your product is, but more depends on whether or not you include that in the text of your pin. Pins that follow this rule see an average of 9X increased awareness.
A surprisingly high rate of users on Pinterest have bought something as a result of interacting with a brand's pin: 85% to be exact. This is something that can't be said of many other platforms out there.
For instance, only 78% of Facebook's user base made a purchase as a result of interacting with a brand's media on the platform in 2018.
Pinterest Ads can actually be quite profitable assuming the audience fits. For more on Pinterest advertising costs and dynamics, check out this article.
While Pinterest definitely hasn't broken any world records in the sheer number of users, when you start to pick apart the specifics of their user base, you begin to see that they actually have broken some records in other regards.
The fact that Pinterest traffic results in the highest AOV of any social platform is something that sort of makes the small total numbers stand out in a new light. This is one of the many reasons why it was even mentioned in our article on essential channels for ecommerce.
Definitely don't shy away from this platform if you are trying to improve your ecommerce's traffic and brand awareness: the visual nature of the platform and close bond between the users and their lifestyle visions makes it the ideal place to find your most avid customers.
