Understanding Pinterest

If you’ve never used Pinterest, the concept is easy to grasp. Once you’ve created an account, you can ‘pin’ images to individual boards that you create. You can set each of these boards to a specific category, i.e. cooking, fashion, photography etc. and add as many images that you want. You can even share boards with other users and contribute content together. Anything you pin can be liked or ‘repined’ by any other user, more commonly your followers. Basically it’s just a way to build a collection of anything that sparks your interest.

How Pinterest have taken action against spammers

When Pinterest was fairly new on the scene, some people found it fairly easy to manipulate the system. For instance, following mass users in the hope that some would follow back. With no max follow limit and the use of automatic bots, these users could follow thousands of people per day. The use of automatic bots has become much more popular with social media sites this past year, especially Pinterest.  It was also very easy to submit content with an affiliate link (most notably amazon affiliates). So coupled with the use of automatic posting bots, these spammers were making a killing from Pinterest up to a certain point.

Since a popular spammer revealed his massive earnings, Pinterest has improved its system and upgraded its anti-spamming features. For instance, any user may only follow a maximum of 200 users pay day before being greeted with a ‘warning message’. It also blocks the use of affiliate URLs from major networks when submitting content. If you’re a legitimate user promoting a brand, it’s still possible to link to the sales page of your content.  Pinterest have also been cracking down on users with multiple accounts, although this is obviously very difficult when the users are using proxy servers.

Can you make easy money on Pinterest?

If you’re looking to make easy money on Pinterest then you’d better start building your time machine because the current outlook doesn’t look promising. Although if you do manage to build a time machine I’d suggest you visit a more historical period in time instead of 2010. Now if you’re looking for a way to compliment your brand’s website, Pinterest can be extremely useful. An official Pinterest account with a recognisable brand is obviously going to attract more users from the off. Affiliate URLs may be out the window, but if you’re linking to your website or perhaps even your sales page I can’t see why Pinterest would have a problem with that. Just be sure your target audience actually uses the thing.

Pinterest user demographics

As soon as you start using Pinterest regularly you’ll probably notice that pretty much all the users are female. I can’t guarantee that all these users are legitimately women because let’s face it, we’re on the internet. According to a recent study, over two thirds of the users are female, with the most popular age group being the 25 – 35 year olds. Plus a whopping 97% of fans of Pinterest on Facebook are apparently women. If your website specialises in mustache combs or home brew beer, it’s probably time to throw in the towel. With such a massive female user base, it’s no wonder clothes dealers, jewellery makers and interior designers are so popular on Pinterest.