So far, you've seen various types of social media platforms including more mainstream sites or apps and some that focus on specific or unique offerings. Now we'll take a look at one of the most visual of the platforms, Pinterest. Like all the social media sites you've seen, Pinterest's founder Ben Silbermann started another site first that failed. It was called Tots. It was a shopping app that had too many features. But then Silbermann founded Pinterest which centered around one thing, images. Pinterest was launched at the end of 2009. The founders helped foster early usership by meeting up with users in person and giving out personal contact information so users could connect with them directly. Additionally, early Pinterest access was invitation-only, creating an exclusivity that only grew their following. Today, Pinterest is considered a visual discovery platform that boasts 330 million users worldwide. Just under half of Pinterest's user base is located in the US. Most Pinterest users can be found globally with its top countries being Germany, France, and the UK. What distinguishes Pinterest from other platforms? Aside from being focused on visuals, Pinterest doesn't rely on real-time updates, it doesn't need to. Neither does it includes status updates nor really any text-based sharing. While it's considered a social media site and while users can interact with other users, Pinterest offers the option to use it without ever interacting with another user. Who uses Pinterest? Over 330 million people worldwide use Pinterest, both online and through the mobile app and have pinned over 200 billion pins. More than half of those users check Pinterest at least once a week and two-thirds of those users are women. Most users, 69 percent, are under the age of 50, with an even split between 18-29 year-olds and 30-49 year-olds. Let's take a closer look at this image centric platform, how users can create boards and pin images and unique benefits of this platform for businesses. Pinterest has one goal in mind, inspiration. Because Pinterest understands that images provide a visual communication that goes beyond words, they've created a platform that allows users to search and find images or pins and then add those images or pin them to a board. The idea is to recreate a practice of pinning photos, clippings or magazine cut-outs to cork boards. User-created boards are collections of inspiration from interior design to vacations to inspiring quotes or mood boards. When you create an account, you'll fill out some basic information. Then to get to know what pins to suggest on your home feed, Pinterest will ask you about your interests and give you some categories to follow. Feel free to start browsing your home feed, which will be a collection of images, games, and videos. But before you can save or pin an image, you'll need to create a board. Boards can be anything you want to create, a collection of ideas for a new renovation or new recipes to try, a dream vacation board or even a fashion board. In fact, Pinterest will now allow you to shop through the pin and 83 percent of users have purchased something they pinned on Pinterest. Boards can be made public or be made private. Pinterest's machine learning and computer vision is able to search images and bases pin suggestions on similar colors, patterns, and contents to images users have pinned before. Let's say you want to redo your living room and needed some inspiration for your project, go to the search bar and type in living room and you'll immediately see some pins filling your screen. Pinterest will also suggest styles or categories so you can get more specific. You may also see promoted pins along the way as well. Already have a color scheme in mind? You can type in living room blue, for instance, into the search bar and Pinterest will now show you all pins with a specific color palette. If you find an image you want to add to your board, Pinterest gives you two ways to pin it, first, you can simply hover over the pin and a red Save button will appear. Before you can save, Pinterest asks you to pick a board to save it to, or you can click into the image, this wont only expand it, but will now give you a new home feed of similar pins you can browse. You can see how you could get sucked into Pinterest for hours. You may be asking, "What exactly makes Pinterest a social network?" The majority of pins originate from other users and have been shared and curated since the beginning of the platform. When users pin images to their boards, they're essentially sharing or retweeting that content. Users can also comment on pins but it's not a common practice. Users can also follow other users or other users boards. Users can also upload their own photos into Pinterest to create an original pin. When you upload an image to create a new pin, Pinterest will ask you to write a little bit about what the pin is an add a destination link if you have one. Once that pin is uploaded, it joins the rest of the pins in the Pinterest ecosystem. Users can also add Pinterest pin-it extensions into their web browsers, to be able to pin images found around the Internet. Because of the image-based nature of Pinterest, businesses have the opportunity to appeal to their customers in visual ways and get their products and goods in front of eyes on a platform outside their own website. Pinterest itself reports that 77 percent of users have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest and that a massive 98 percent of users have tried something new they found on Pinterest. Additionally, Pinterest notes that of their female users, 8 out of 10 are mothers who are typically in charge of buying for their household. This gives businesses a great opportunity to convert visual pins into paying customers for their products or services. In order to make shopping easier, Pinterest has rolled out ways to shop from boards. When users click on a board or pin, they'll find a space beneath the image that allows you to shop your pin. Advertising is also available on Pinterest and similar to Twitter's promoted tweets, it's in the form of a pin that slides into user's home feed. Businesses can choose what that pin looks like, whether it be a classic static image, a video, a carousel of items or a direct call to shop a product. Advertising is targeted based on demographics but it can also be targeted to interest and keywords. Pinterest also offers targeting to people who have similar interests to your customers as well. For example, let's say you want to go on a road trip, head to the search bar and type in road trip. As you scroll through your home feed, you'll see promoted pins scattered throughout. These ads aren't just placed randomly but linked to articles or provide useful information related to your search. As we just saw, Pinterest is a fun, colorful, engaging social media platform that functions in very different ways than most traditional platforms like Facebook. While it's visually-based like Instagram, it's not rooted in real time status updates. It's also a great place for businesses, especially e-commerce businesses, to grow their base and find new customers for their products. Now that we've covered the largest social media platforms, let's turn our attention to a few niche ones in our next video.
