Elaborative SWOT Analysis of Pinterest – A Visual Discovery Engine For Finding Ideas

Quick Stats on Pinterest

Founder	Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp
Year Founded	2009
Origin	San Francisco, California, U.S.
No. of Employees	2,200+
Company Type	Public
Market Cap	$ 23.81 Billion (2021)
Annual Revenue	$ 1.692 Billion (2020)
Net Income/ Profit	$ 128.323 Million (2020)

 

Services by Pinterest

• Home Feed
• Visual search
• Browser button
• Promoted pins
• Pinterest inbox to chat

Competitors of Pinterest

• Salesforce
• Google
• Meta
• Uber
• Twitter

Now that we understand the company’s key business, let’s look after the SWOT Analysis of Pinterest.

SWOT Analysis of Pinterest

SWOT Analysis of Pinterest can show how a well-established company uses its opportunities to ensure its growth. It can show how the company takes advantage of its strengths to use the opportunities while working on its weaknesses. SWOT Analysis of Pinterest will also reveal its expansion plans.

To better understand the SWOT analysis of Pinterest, refer to the infographic below:

Now first let’s begin with the strengths of the company from the SWOT analysis of Pinterest.

Strengths of Pinterest

Strengths refer to those factors which help a company to have an edge over its competitors.

• Focused Functionality: Unlike many other competitors who add a huge amount of different features to their site, Pinterest does one thing and with perfection. It gives the social media platform a great edge as people prefer surfing the site for inspiration and content rather than using the competitor’s site
• Passionate Pin: Pinterest allows its users to chronicle and shares what they love. Their desires, hobbies, aspirations, interests, etc on the feed. People can share their creative content on the feed and publish it on a public platform.
• Intuitive Interface: The app is easy to use. It’s drop-dead simple, possibly because of its focused features, as is impacting web design practices in widespread and profound ways. As the features are limited therefore it becomes user friendly, even children above the age of 13 could use it.
• Massively Browsable: Because of the easy and eye-catching pictures used by the site, it is very easily accessible without any reading to do.
• Equality: The brand has access to the same features that a browser has; it establishes equality in the mind of the users. The brand also does not provide blue ticks for verified accounts maintaining equality within the community.
• Copyright Notification: Pinterest has a notification system that could be used by the copyright holders to request for the content to be removed from various other sites on the net.
• User Base: Billions of searches happen on Pinterest every month around 86% of those come from mobile devices.

Weaknesses of Pinterest

Weaknesses are those things in which a company lags and that can even become a reason for the users to switch to other competitors. Here are some of the Weaknesses of Pinterest

• Link Spam: The contents of the site have to be backed up by a link to a website. This becomes a big disadvantage for Pinterest as people are not able to upload or pin content easily without having a website. Sometimes the links used to upload content are spam and therefore it becomes a huge disadvantage for the platform.
• Focusing on Affiliate Marketing: Pinterest is giving an affiliate marketing opportunity where the top-selling products of different sites can appear on Pinterest, creating an automated revenue system. The products that appear from sites such as Amazon are advertised. This creates a user experience interrupted by promotions. Pinterest is also aware of the problem and is working towards it.
• Increasing Ratio of One Gender User: Pinterest is considered a site for women and it is also used most by women, whereas other sites are more popular with both genders.

Opportunities for Pinterest

• SEO Opportunity: Pinterest provides a great SEO opportunity to its users. People can add links to the content posted on the site and increase traffic on their web pages. The company is expanding their business and growing rapidly.
• Increasing Users’ E-commerce: The user’s e-commerce integration if works properly will drive more traffic and keep the audience happy. Interlinking users’ business web pages as well as providing an opportunity to create advertisements for their e-commerce is a great opportunity for the site.

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• Connect Account with Other Platforms: Pinterest has an option to connect one Facebook or Twitter account which gives another great opportunity as the content of Pinterest can be now advertised on these platforms as well.

Threats to Pinterest

• Fear of Acquisition: The is trying to work alone with a quite different user interface and therefore it becomes prone to acquisitions by companies such as Google, etc.
• Copyright Infringement: Pinterest encourages its users to copy the content from the net to the sites which could lead to copyright infringement and legal actions against the users.
• Scam or Spams: The pins are sometimes scams or spam which greatly affect the company’s credibility.

This ends our detailed SWOT analysis of Pinterest. Let us conclude our learning below.