Introduction to Pinterest

In my 8th blog in a series introducing Social Media I would like to introduce you to Pinterest.  

      

Pinterest allows you to share pictures or videos, like an on line picture board, or “pinboard”.  These may be your own pictures and videos or they may be pictures and videos you have found and wish to easily and quickly share with others, like visual bookmarking.   

Social Media is about getting your messages found by others.  So when a platform like www.pinterest.com  arrives making it easy to publish and share your visual content, positively encouraging others to share your content – and when this platform enjoys a meteoric rise in popularity – its time we had a looksee.

Lets deal with the terminology.  An image or video added to Pinterest is called a ‘Pin’.  Pins are added to a ‘PinBoard’, which is a collection of Pins with a common theme.  The act of sharing a Pin on a PinBoard is called ‘Pinning’.  If you like someone else’s pin and decide to repost it, this is a “Re-Pin”.  And finally, there’s the “Pin It Button” – this is a button placed on a website making it easy to share content onto Pinterest from the website – Pins added via the Pin It Button carry back links to the originating web site, which is good, very good. 

 

Take Social Media statistics with a pinch of salt, suffice to say all the charts and infograms are showing Pinterest has established itself in the top Social Networking sites.   Pinterest has the ability to take your message viral in hours, and Google is full of case studies - Googling “Pinterest  Success” and I received 25,400 results.

Finally - Pinterest is about to enjoy an explosion in popularity because until very recently you could only join Pinterest by invitation.   Now anyone can open a Pinterest account... so if you have visual content to share - now you have the means and ... its FREE.