Pinterest: A pin on the board | SocialExcerpts

Pinterest: A pin on the board Sep 18

Pinterest was started by Ben Sibermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra with a vision to “connect everyone in the world through ‘things’ that they find interesting”.

Conceptualization of Pinterest started in December, 2009 and beta was launched in March, 2010, this site was operated through “invitation only” at first and later opened for public. Ben Sibermann is said to have personally written to first 9000 followers of Pinterest giving them his personal phone numbers and meeting them in person. Now you can log in to this site with you Facebook or Twitter authentications.

In December, 2011, the site became one of the largest social networking services with 11 million total visit per week. In January, 2012, Pinterest drove more traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+. It was, no wonder, termed best startup of 2011 by TechCrunch. During January 2012, Pinterest had 11.7 million unique users, thus making it the fastest site in the history to break the 10 million unique visitor mark (alas, there is no Guinness record for it). Interestingly, most of the site users are females.

Pinterest has played a very important role in the run-up to 2012 US Presidential election. The wives of both the candidates created accounts on Pinterest accounts. Ann Romney debuted in March, followed by the First Lady Michele Obama in June.

So far retail companies have taken full advantage of Pinterest for style trending and advertising. The design of the webpage provides an ideal layout for the “style conscious” retailers, where products can be easily visualized with a buyer context.

Pinterest does have a problem with spammers. Retailers like Starbucks had their fake coupons for discount created and circulated on Pinterest. Needless to mention, the chaos it created among Starbucks and its customers. Bu, if we ignore the problem of Pinterest with spammers, the website so far is doing well. People with similar hobbies and passions meet and share their experiences visually. We are sure Pinterest is working towards consumer safety if they want their portal to be used for business.

Would you like to use Pinterest to grow your business? Let us know.