Pinterest vs Instagram – yes, they both are effective marketing platforms for your business. But it’s important to understand that they serve very different functions.

There are so many social media platforms out there to choose from when it comes to marketing your business.

We see a lot of people coming from Instagram when they begin marketing on Pinterest. They know how to market on Instagram so they attempt to apply that same approach on Pinterest. The problem is that the two platforms operate very differently

So what are the major differences when it comes to Pinterest vs Instagram?

Let’s chat about the purpose of each platform, break down the audience characteristics, and learn how to leverage both platforms in different ways for your business. 

Pinterest vs Instagram for Marketing Your Business

Platform Users

As of Q4 in 2021, Pinterest had 444 million monthly active users worldwide, with 89 million from the U.S. Pew Research found that Pinterest ranked fourth in audience size after YouTube, Facebook and Instagram in 2021 with 38% of US adults claiming to have used Pinterest. Usage on Pinterest here in the U.S. is higher than LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp, Nextdoor, and Reddit.

Instagram has confirmed that they have over 1.22 billion monthly active users, but it’s rumored to be more like 2 billion monthly users. The audience size across the two platforms is considerably different. Instagram completely blows Pinterest out of the water when it comes to the number of users.

Let’s look at the user characteristics for each platform.

First, it’s interesting to note that there is a gender divide for both platforms with women outranking men. Women have always outranked men on Pinterest, but the gap may be narrowing a bit with 60% of Pinterest users being women. 

Every year I see Pinterest saying men are the fastest growing demographic. I’m not sure what the starting comparison number for male Pinners was, but they say that number has grown by 50%. We do know that Pinterest is making another push to increase the number of men on their platform in 2022.

Stats on the gender gap for Instagram are slightly different. Fifty-one percent of Instagram users are female and 49% are male.

Pinterest is not a platform people visit multiple times a day. According to Cast From Clay, only 4% of Pinterest users in the U.S. and 8% in the U.K., use Pinterest multiple times in a day. Those percentages are low compared to Instagram users (who spend an average of 30 minutes a day on the platform).

Pinterest refers to people who use the platform three to five times or more each day as Power Pinners. Power Pinners are considered by some “the people to follow” because their huge number of followers can greatly enhance your user experience.