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Gender Search on Pinterest: How to Market to Men on Pinterest

Pinterest Search Results Will Differ For Men And Women

Gendered Search Results

Pinterest announced in late January of 2015 that the gender of the user will influence how Pinterest results are shown to him or her. The visual discovery tool that has been used mostly by women is now able to show results to men that are more relevant and less “womanly.“

If you’re a woman that types in the search term, movies into Pinterest search, you may see pins related to Titanic, Frozen, or the Notebook. It seems that the theme of romance movies comes up. But with the new search, men may see movie pins related to Gladiator, Guardians of the Galaxy and Fight Club as the top results.


The Number of Men Using Pinterest Doubled in 2014

Pinterest announced that the number of men using Pinterest doubled in 2014, but this still makes up a minority of users. What’s interesting to note is that there are more men that use Pinterest in the U.S. than read Sports Illustrated and GQ combined.

Late in 2013 I made the prediction that in 2014 there would still be problems trying to get men to jump aboard Pinterest. And the main reason for this is because of the irrelevancy of many search results when men use it.

First time and non frequent users of Pinterest don’t go and follow boards – they use the search box.

And over time if search results don’t bring back what you want, you abandon using the search engine. And Pinterest is a search engine, and in many ways is superior to Google.

If users aren’t able to find what they need they’re going to abandon using search engine. For those of you who remember the days before Google, you will remember how horrible it was using search engines like Lycos.

There’s a lesson to be learned in all of that.

You have to give users what they want. And that means giving men relevant information as soon as possible. New users are only patient up to a point before they abandon a network or any search engine.

Now with a search engine that provides results based on gender, it’s assumed that men are going to get more relevant search results.

This is good news for both users and for businesses. I truly believe that we’re at a point where more men are going to be using Pinterest as a search engine, but it’s still going to take another two years before it becomes mainstream.

The question is, “How to market to men on Pinterest?” Here are three guidelines.


How Your Business Can Market to Men on Pinterest

If Pinterest wants to be incredibly profitable and wants more advertisers to jump on board, they know that they HAVE to grow the amount of active males users.

With Pinterest being serious about growing their male users, you should strongly consider using Pinterest to grow your business. And here’s how to get started on your Pinterest marketing.


1) See If There’s A Hot Bed of Activity Going On For Your Product or Service

The first thing that you want to do is to see if what you’re selling or something related to what you are selling is already on Pinterest.

To get an idea of what’s popular and whether people are interested in what you have to sell, type in your product in the Pinterest search box. If you happen to sell chairs, then you can see what type of chairs that men are paying attention to on Pinterest.

Chairs in Pinterest Search

Here are the first few search results for chairs when using a female user account.

Chairs for Women

When looking at Pinterest search results, what you’re looking for is the repin activity regarding this product and the type of photos that are being used. Notice if the pins are just product shots, or products in an environment, or if they’re pins with people using the product. All those details will matter in trying to grow your Pinterest business with male users.

Pinterest’s job is to provide relevant results. And so they are constantly adjusting search results to match what most people are looking for and clicking on.

For example, when you type in glasses, you’ll notice eye glasses pop up versus drinking glasses for the first few results, and that was decided by users’ actions and engagement with pins.

Glasses on Pinterest

If Pinterest finds that people click through on pins related to eye glasses more than pins about drinking glasses, then that’s how they know that they should show eye glasses more often for the search term “glasses.”

When you’re able to see what pins already exist and are already popular, you can start to create pins around the same themes and with some results you’ll notice the same color themes.


2) Used Guided Search for those Gender Keywords

Guided search is a type of search recommendation tool for Pinterest searchers. The goal of Guided Search is to help you find what you’re looking for, or to help you discover what you’re looking for that you’re not aware of.

In the previous picture, you will have noticed words that are above the pins. The tool that recommends those search terms is known as Guided Search.

With the new gender based search results with Pinterest, Guided Search itself also receives a bit of a gender twist.

What’s great for you, as a business, is that you now know what type of words male and female users are searching for and you can start to add those keywords into your pin descriptions.

Go back to the earlier photo and look at the recommended search terms. Now look at the photo below, and notice the Guided Search terms that show up on the tiles for the search term glasses for a female user. Some of them are the same, while others are quite different.

Glasses on Pinterest for Women

In the Pinterest search results for males, you’ll notice that Guided Search recommends the term etching, but with the female search results, it’s not shown in first few results.

If you happen to be targeting males on Pinterest, you now have some insight into the type of search words that they are using to find your products.


3) Use Pinterest Data For Content Creation

What’s I love about this new feature is that Pinterest is giving you a lot of free data. A lot. And you have to take advantage of that, because if you don’t someone else already is. I know, I’ve consulted for some of these businesses that use this technique.

The most popular guided search term associated with glasses, is “For My Shape.” People are genuinely curious to know what type of glasses fit what shape face. And if you run a glass store, and have a blog, then this definitely needs to be one of topics for your blog.

Once that blog has been written, and you’ve created an image for it, post it on Pintrest.

Alisa Meredith and Tina Gammon of Scalable Social Media did this with one of their clients to help him generate hundreds of leads. They created e-books, landing pages, and blog posts based on what was popular on Pinterest to help their client be extremely relevant to his Pinterest audience.


Not Every Search Result is Gender Based on Pinterest

Not every single search is going to bring up results that are different based on your gender. Search terms such as small speakers, and shampoo still show up with the same results.

This doesn’t mean that as a male oriented business that you shouldn’t get started with your products on Pinterest. This is because over time, Pinterest will keep refining their search until they can find that great balance. It never quite ends. The same way that Google will always tweak little things to ensure that search results are more relevant.

If you’re a business owner who sells manly products, I encourage you to go to Pinterest, search up products that you sell and see what’s there, and to at least start a Pinterest account. A good business doesn’t just think about the now, it also thinks about where its future customers are most likely going to be.

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Written by Vincent NG

I’m a social media marketer, particularly for Pinterest, It all started back in 2010 when Pinterest was in beta. It was the fastest independent website to get 10 million unique visitors in the U.S. This really struck a chord with me, and it was then that I knew that Pinterest was going to be a powerhouse in the world of digital and social media marketing.