Loren Terveen

I will report on several quantitative studies of Pinterest, a popular social curation site where people collect, organize, and share pictures of items. We investigated several key issues: What distinguishes Pinterest from existing sites (like Twitter); and what patterns of activity attract attention (audience and content reposting)? We organized our studies around a number of theoretically grounded factors including: (i) the extent to which users specialize in particular topics, (ii) homophily (similarity of interests) among users, and (iii) gender. Our key findings include:

• Four verbs set Pinterest apart from Twitter: use, look, want, and need;
• Women and men differed in the types of content they collected and the degree to which they specialized; further, male Pinterest users were not particularly interested in stereotypically male topics;  
• Sharing diverse types of content increases your audience, but only up to a certain point;
• Homophily drives repinning: people repin content from other users who share their interests; homophily also affects following, but to a lesser extent.

Our findings open up new research questions and suggest strategies both for users (e.g., strategies to attract an audience) and maintainers (e.g., content recommendation methods) of social curation sites.