Dive Brief:
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Pinterest now has more than 150 million users globally each month, the social media website announced on Thursday with a nod to the increasing diversity of its user base: More than half of the social media site's users and three quarters of its new signups are from outside of the U.S., according to a blog post by co-founder/ CEO Ben Silbermann.
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While the site has long been seen as mostly for women, 40% of those who join are now men — 70% more than this time last year, according to Silbermann's blog post. Still, 70% of Pinterest’s U.S. users are women, according to statistics from digital analytics firm comScore cited by The Wall Street Journal.
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In a Tuesday blog post aimed at businesses, written by Pinterest product manager Frank Fumarola, the company also touted updates to its marketing capabilities. Using Ads Manager, marketers can create an audience and retarget five specific actions: clicks, comments, saves, likes and closeups, and create specific Pins linking back to a retail website using data based on users’ interest.
Dive Insight:
Pinterest has been working diligently to prove its worth to marketers, retailers and investors ahead of a widely anticipated initial public offering. With users already coming to the website to share ideas that often include a variety of products — to use in projects from crafts to interior design — the social media site has always had a natural usefulness to retailers. Other platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, have less obvious connections to commerce.
Pinterest this year alone has already rolled out a variety of e-commerce, analytics, search and advertising tools useful to retailers. But the site will need to work to regain disappointed marketers, who were especially let down by the company's much-vaunted buyable pins. A Channel Advisor report on social media sales conversions from last September found that Pinterest trailed Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. At the time, the platform's only true e-commerce feature was buyable pins, which never really took off as a way for its users to actually make purchases.
While Pinterest seems to be more promising than ever for retailers, it does risk over-estimating its potential at a time when investors have grown leery of tech-based startups, the Journal notes. The company projected it would have $169 million in revenue and 150 million users by the end of 2015, but Pinterest missed on both counts, according to the Journal. Pinterest has raised some $1.3 billion, including $533 million last year and will ease up on funding rounds to prepare for an IPO.
“There were some early projections when we were just a couple months into building the business, but we’ve learned more about it,” Silbermann told the Journal.