Why Pinterest is Hot!

Pinterest is addictive – okay, maybe it’s because I’m a girl, since the new cyber site’s audience is primarily female. But it’s clearly pretty attractive to venture capitalists too.

Named one of the top 50 websites for 2011 by Time Magazine, Pinterest (rhymes with interest) is one of the hottest new social media sites with enduring specialties that qualifies it as the next ‘Twitter.’ Its value through venture financing has soared from $40 million to over $200 million in only a few months.

Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. Since educational research suggests that over 80% of human learning occurs visually, you’ll quickly get the appeal.

Here’s how it goes: It’s like a giant scrapbook of ideas. When you find things of interest to your audience, this new platform allows you to upload those images as Pins and place them on custom-themed Boards and organize and share them on any topic that you choose. Others can follow your Boards and add comments. You can also allow them to post to your boards.

New and growing – and there’s an app for that.

Like I said, Pinterest is new and it’s still far behind site visitors compared to Facebook, but it is making up for it in the amount of time spent on the site. An incredible 88.3 minutes was spent in November, according to comScore. This number is third only to Facebook (394 minutes) and Tumblr (141.7 minutes) and is also twice the amount of time that the average user spends on Twitter and 10 times the time spent on Google +. Plus, you can use your iPhone and get an app for it, so you’re your own roving Pinner.

A study by Experian Hitwise, which analyzed the one-year-old site’s traffic reveals that Pinterest:

• Had 11 million hits in just one week in December 2011 (almost 40 times more than what it was getting in June, 2011)
• Its major popularity is with women – 58% of the site's visitors in the past 12 months.
• Of the women visitors, 59% are between the ages of 25 and 44.
• And the site is gaining the most popularity in the Northwest and Southeast
• Right now, most of the pins are concerning home décor, crafts, fashion and food. But don’t let that “most” lull you into thinking this is not for your brand. A whole world of subjects and ideas are already pinned.

So how will brands use Pinterest? Here are a few ideas.

It’s good to see how some of the early adopter brands are already using Pinterest to showcase their offerings, attitudes, insights and provenance.

Start by checking out these four, very different brands on Pinterest:

• Time Magazine: http://pinterest.com/time_magazine/pins/
• Mashable: http://pinterest.com/mashable/pins/
• Nordstrom: http://pinterest.com/nordstrom/pins/
• Wholefoods: http://pinterest.com/wholefoods/pins

Pinterest allows you to showcase your brand in a unique and visually thrilling way - consider pinning videos, infographics, product images, blog posts – in addition to:

• Great potential for internal use with your brand’s creative teams – storyboards, branding strategies, campaign ideas, design ideas, industry trends.
• A great way to keep tabs on what’s hot and pin what your customers might find interesting.
• Potential for greater SEO (you can embed Pinterest to your brand’s website or blog)
• Organize areas of focus for your teams – keep up and share what is hot within your brand niche or industry focus
• Research – check in and see what people are pinning in your category
• Interact with your audience by testing new campaign ideas and concepts

To help you get started take a look at Rob Lammie’s article, Pinterest: A Beginner’s Guide to the Hot New Social Network

What do you think? Are you familiar with Pinterest? Are you using Pinterest in your social media mix yet?

While you're checking it out, connect with me there! http://pinterest.com/pljyork/

Special thanks to Michael Gass, Kip Bodner and Mashable for giving us a heads up and lots of stats!

-Priscilla

Image Credit