The explosive growth of Pinterest during the four years since its creation has been a blessing and a challenge for the social media platform and the people who use it. There are more than 750 million boards and billions of images, many of the geared toward things that interest women, who make up more than 70 percent of the Pinterest audience. To make it easier to find content and to reach male users, Pinterest has added a Guided Search feature.
One of the challenges of using Pinterest is finding appropriate content or users to pin and follow. To help consumers and marketers find what they need in among the millions images and boards, Pinterest has added a new Guided Search feature to their English website and mobile apps. While this will be helpful for all users, Pinterest is hoping that it will be particularly helpful for male users.
“If you do a lot of searching on Pinterest, you may already have noticed the results you’re seeing are better than ever,” wrote engineer Pei Yin in a blog on Pinterest. “For example, say you’re looking for a new watch. Before when you searched Pinterest for “watches,” your results would include mostly women’s timepieces. But now, men will see Pins and guides inspired by what other guys have Pinned, and everybody’s results should feel a lot closer to what they’re looking for.”
Another new search feature involves descriptive guides to help searchers. Here’s how it works: When a Pinterest user searches for something, descriptive guides will help the user sift through a the various ideas and pins. By scrolling through the guides and tap any that look interesting, Pinterest can narrow down the search to steer the search in the right direction.
Pinterest gave the example of search that starts with “haircuts” then gets narrowed down to the style of haircut (curly, straight, etc.). Or search that starts with “plants” can lead to categories for indoor plants, succulent plants, and more.
“The guides are there to get you where you want to go, but the best part is leaving a little room for serendipity, wrote Hui Xu, of the Discovery Team, in a blog on Pinterest. “Exploring getaway ideas might lead you to a treehouse adventure, a motorcycle trip down the coast, or maybe even something else you didn’t know you were looking for. You might be surprised where you end up!”
Here’s a quick video from Pinterest that shows how the guided search feature will work.
While the Guided Search feature mostly helps consumers, it helps marketers in several ways as well. First, by making it easier to find pins that fit the needs of users, Guided Search will lead customers to the marketing content that would otherwise be undiscoverable amongst the billion of other images on Pinterest. Using the examples from before, a hair stylist would benefit greatly by having boards that specifically feature curly hair cuts, short hair styles and more.
Additionally, one way for marketers to increase their numbers of followers is to like pages with similar interests. For marketers who want to reach male consumers, they can easily find other boards with male-centric interests that they can follow and hopefully lead more people back to their page.
These new features will be rolling out on English sites and apps first, but Pinterest says they international users will see Guided Search soon.
For more information on how marketers can use Pinterest, read this article on how Pinterest has opened up Promoted Pins to all marketers.