Women on Pinterest Get More repins, but Fewer Followers

A new study was carried out recently by the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Minnesota and compared two social networks: Twitter to Pinterest. The findings provide  insight into both social networks and are really interesting.

First of all, ladies, you will be happy to hear that women get, on average, more repins than men. But don’t be too happy, as men have more followers, and that’s an aspect that should be analyzed in the future in order to determine the reasons behind this surprising finding.

Moreover, American and British users get more repins. The researchers mention though that they didn’t take into consideration users from all over the world, but they do say that this should be an aspect to analyze in future studies.

Not surprisingly, posts with more comments and likes get more repins, however, the study revealed that a higher frequency of posts lead to a lower number of repins.

Pinterest seems to be all about verbs, as “use”, “look”, “want”, “need” are the most popular words in this network. On the other hand, Twitter is all about “now” – “lol, watching now” and other time-related words – “tomorrow”, “tonight”, “today”, etc. From this point of view, Pinterest seems to be more business oriented.

“In this paper, we use a quantitative approach to study three research questions about the site. What drives activity on Pinterest? What role does gender play in the site’s social connections? And finally, what distinguishes Pinterest from existing networks, in particular Twitter?”

The researchers mention also new analysis directions and also some limitations their paper has. Indeed future work is needed, but it is important for marketers – and not only – to understand the behaviour of users from various social networks.