Strengths And Weaknesses Of Pinterest

A. Strengths: Some of the strengths of Pinterest include their already large amount of online and application users. Being the 3rd most popular social network in the world as of 2012, and their value of over a billion dollars, they have a large capital.

B. Weaknesses: Some of their weaknesses include the site not having a large amount of male users with over 85% of all the users being women, and only 13% of U.S online users are males . In order to improve their revenue they need to figure out a way to get men more attracted to the site. Also people might be pressured into purchasing goods, they might not need or afford whenever they go on the site. As opposed to going on Facebook or Twitter for social interaction with friends not expecting

The impact of social media on consumer behavior and marketing is very prevalent. Often times people will want what other people have, or try to have something better than the next person. For example if a lot of people in your social network posts something about the great new IPhone that just came out, you might possibly want the same IPhone for yourself. Also people are often times try to outdo each other. They want the latest shoes, fancy car, and stylish clothing in order to appear a certain way on social media. This makes it easy to market certain items on social media. Also I lot of times users will market the product or service themselves without the actual company having to spend any marketing dollars. Companies are monetizing this technology by using these platforms which will take away any marketing dollars spent. They are now able to reach a larger platform with social interaction with consumers as well as well placed

The challenges that Pinterest will face is will they be able to innovate as the market changes. To gain permanent relevance they need to keep their core group of consumers (women) satisfied. As well as to expand to market towards more men and other age groups. A big reason why Myspace lost its popularity is because it only catered to a specific age group at the time and failed to innovate. Personally I have been on Pinterest one time, and have not visited it since. From what I remember almost none of my interests matched the pictures or pins that I observed. I do remember going onto a shoe website from Pinterest that sold cheap name brand shoes. I soon found out it was a Chinese site that was selling fake products. From that point I think that where I made up my mind I would never need Pinterest. I feel that Pinterest will be able to gain permanent relevance because they have such a cult following with women. Almost similar to the amount of middle aged women fans that Oprah Winfrey’s talk show had, she knew who her market niche was and tailored her business to her niche, like what Pinterest is doing