What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social network that allows people to share collect and share web pages. It’s a little bit different because it does so with visual images rather than links. Simply put Pinterest is an online pinboard. You create an account and while you surf the Internet you pin things you find interesting to your board. You can create an infinite number of boards and those boards can be around any subject like humor or gardening.

Like Facebook with “Likes” and Twitter with “Tweets”, Pinterest has it’s own language but one that is not very difficult to understand

A Pin: An image added to a Pinterest board

A Pinboard: A set of pins around a common theme that the user decides. Common themes are recipes or places I want to go or outfits I want to buy.

Pinning: When you put a pin onto a Pinterest board it is called “pinning”

Followers/Following: Each account and each board has people that follow it and you the Pinterest user can follow their accounts or individual boards.

Repin: When someone finds an interesting pin on someone’s board they can repin the pin to their own board. When someone repins a pin to their board, their followers will see it.

Sharing is caring... and Pinning is Winning

Where the idea of Pinterest gets really interesting is in how people are able to share. Like Facebook, people are able to follow different people and brands’ pinboards and they can repin stuff they like to their own board. This is how Pinterest can create a viral traffic push to websites. People keep repinning content they like and every time they repin a piece of content, their followers see it. This has been huge for retailers as many people have pinned clothes, shoes, and related accessories to their boards. By adding this content, people are able to virtually window shop the Internet based on what their friends have pinned.

Pinterest v. “other networks”

One thing we always look at it isn’t whether a network is important but whether or not it is worthwhile compared to other online social networks like Google plus. This has to do simply with the amount of time a business can dedicate to making a concerted effort to manage and keep that social network page relevant. Pinterest now drives more traffic to retailer websites then Google +, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. The only websites that have more traffic referrals are Facebook and Twitter.

The second stat to look at is usage. How often and for how long is a network being used? This simple stat should give you an idea of the probability your board will be seen and shared, because if no one is using it, the likelihood of someone actually coming across your page with all of your hard work is pretty much nil. Recent data from comscore is suggesting what a lot of people already suspected, while there are a lot of users on Google plus, there doesn’t appear to be any real activity. Users spent over 89 min on Pinterest in the month of January but each user on Google plus spent an average of only three minutes per visit on Google plus.