Hughes blog post: Are you Pinterested?

Pinterest: it’s the new black of the social media world.

With over 11 million unique visitors per month, Pinterest became the fastest standalone website in history to generate more than 10 million page views per month.

The estimated unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429 percent over a three month period from September to December 2011. And did you know measurement data has shown that last month Pinterest drove more traffic to online publishers than Twitter?

So, what’s Pinterest all about?

Pinterest describes itself as ‘a virtual pinboard’, “Pinterest allows you to organise and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”

Like Twitter, people can ‘follow’ users on Pinterest. Pinterest users create boards, and bookmark, or ‘pin’ the content that they like to those boards. From a user perspective, Pinterest can be a particularly useful bookmarking tool to gather ideas, for example, when planning an event big or small, a holiday or a craft or home decorating project. You can ‘pin’ images of a particular style or fashion era that interests you, your dream car, or it might even be the place you find the dish that will impress your friends at your next dinner party.

As it continues to grow, increasingly more and more brands are recognising the opportunities that the platform presents and embracing all things Pinterest.

Pinterest provides a platform for brands to engage with followers and build brand awareness and identity, while not necessarily being a direct sales tool. International companies that have recently established a Pinterest presence include designer brand Kate Spade New York. On Pinterest, Kate Spade New York is engaging with its followers by sharing imagery that appeals to them, all while remaining true to their design aesthetic and Kate Spade’s fun and playful brand personality. Kate Spade’s VP/eCommerce Johanna Murphy talked about using Pinterest in this Business Insider piece.

Just last week, Tourism Australia became one of the first major Australian brands to launch a presence on the popular site and at the time of writing had over 400 followers.

A spokesperson explained their motivations behind this decision in this recent Mumbrella article. There’s little doubt that the statistics are impressive and Pinterest can be an effective online marketing tool but before brands decide to start pinning, it’s important to assess whether Pinterest is a good fit with an overall communications and digital media strategy.

Does Pinterest tie in to your communications objectives? Does Pinterest fit in with your brand personality? Are your key demographics using Pinterest? What sort of content would you share? These are all questions that should be addressed before a presence is established.

Questions have also been raised about Pinterest and copyright. Last month, attorney and photographer Kirsten Kowalski made the decision to delete her Pinterest inspiration boards due to concerns of copyright infringement in pinning other people's work.

It’s definitely one to watch – things could get very pinteresting!

- Natalie Ciccocioppo