Bob Vila Sees 20% Lift In Website Visits From Male Pinterest Users: 5 Questions With Brand’s Social Media Director

The DIY home improvement company says it's reaping the benefits of Pinterest's efforts to attract more males.

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What’s a social media site to do when men keep looking the other way? If you’re Pinterest – you take action.

After increasing its number of male users by more than 70 percent in 2014, Pinterest recently rolled-out gender-based content suggestions and search results to attract more men to the site.

As Bob Vila’s editor and social media director, Caitlin Castelaz says her brand is definitely seeing the results of Pinterest’s efforts. According to Castelaz, men represent about 15 percent of her brand’s total website visits from Pinterest, but that number is growing at a rate of 20 percent per month.

“Pinterest is one of our most exciting channels because of the DIY’ers,” says Castelaz, who has helped increase the brand’s overall Pinterest followers from 11,000 to more than 100,000 since joining the company in November 2013, “I’m really excited by how we’ve grown.”

Today, Castelaz talks to Marketing Land about her brand’s Pinterest strategy, and offers details on Bob Vila’s male Pinterest follower numbers, including which boards have noticeably more male followers.

5 Questions with Bob Vila’s Editor & Social Media Director

Get To Know:

Caitlin Castelaz

Editor & Social Media Director @ Bob Vila

Amy Gesenhues: Can you give me a quick overview of your brand’s Pinterest strategy?

Caitlin Castelaz As a publisher, we’re primarily interested in inviting folks to read and share our content and that starts with crafting useful pieces.

To put it succinctly, we want to share tips, and ideas to help DIYers of all stripes get the home they want. That’s what drives the ideas behind all of our articles, inspiration galleries, and videos at BobVila.com – so pinning is this really organic extension of our editorial charge.

Pinterest is a natural home for us, given our emphasis on DIY. It’s a really important social channel to us and we stay tuned in to watch what our followers like best, and tailor our pins accordingly. And that’s really what we aim to do on all of BobVila.com’s social channels — to have that dialogue with folks.

Amy Gesenhues: Have you seen evidence of Pinterest’s efforts to attract more male users? 

Caitlin Castelaz About 30 percent of our followers who interact with our pins each month on Pinterest are male. Male Pinterest users make up about 15 percent of our total site visits from the channel every month.

Those visits are only continuing to grow at a rate of 20 percent per month, so we’re certainly seeing the proof of Pinterest’s numbers at BobVila.com.

We’d love to engage more males on Pinterest. Since we’re a publisher, for us that really starts on the editorial side by creating content that we believe speaks to men in particular, or better yet, all folks regardless of gender.

Facebook is similar to Pinterest in that we tend to see more female engagement there. However, the gender gap in engagement is much more subtle than on Pinterest.

On the other hand, we have proportionately more male engagement on Twitter than either Pinterest or Facebook.

Amy Gesenhues: Do you any of your boards have noticeably more male followers?

Caitlin Castelaz Lots of home improvement projects really cross gender lines.

We do still see a few female commenters mention they’re saving a pin to their “honey do list” board, but that’s not the whole picture because we also hear from many men and women who are personally tackling these projects at home. For that reason, we try to pin content that’s relevant to everyone.

I will say that we do have a lot of male followers on Bob Vila’s Picks: How to Guides.

Bob Vila How To Guides board

Amy Gesenhues: What type of visual content have you found works best on Pinterest compared to your other social media platforms?

Caitlin Castelaz In general, pins with great tips – a quick tip for getting rid of weeds, for instance, or easy DIY projects do well for us.

The notion that Pinterest is a search tool as much as a social platform really holds true. When DIYers log on, they’re often looking for a weekend project. Not so on all of our other social channels where users might want to hear Bob Vila’s take on, say, the pros and cons of different furnace models.

Each social channel is different. Different likes, dislikes, different audiences altogether, sometimes. So, that’s how I have to approach it when we think about our pins or Facebook posts; I think about who’s going to be reading this stuff and how can we best serve their interests.

Two of our boards that top the list of most engaging are Bob Vila’s Picks: Tools/Workshop and Bob Vila’s Picks: DIY Projects.

Bob Vila DIY board

Amy Gesenhues: What have you learned about your audience from Pinterest?

Caitlin Castelaz We’ve learned that our Pinterest followers are doers in every sense. They love actionable tips and projects that they can bring home. So we take note of their interests and we bring those insights into our editorial conversations for new site features, new articles, new inspiration galleries.

One of the biggest things that we’ve discovered about our audience is that folks like really simple projects. It makes sense, of course – most of us are so busy and we can’t commit to something large-scale. But simplicity has its limits, and sometimes folks favor easy projects because they’re not 100% sure of their own skills and talents. So, that’s when we realized that we could create a really easy step-by-step video program to walk our social media fans through the basics of building some of the more “daunting” DIY projects.

We’re really excited to take this next step in helping DIYers complete the projects they want, and to build their confidence along the way. So this new video program is a series of courses called Bob Vila Academy and we’re launching it this spring on BobVila.com.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Amy Gesenhues
Contributor
Amy Gesenhues was a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

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