A picture paints a thousand words - the phenomenal rise of Pinterest

The great thing about Pinterest is that it’s not only useful on a personal level, it has great applications for business. Chris Brogan talks about the rise of Pinterest in The Drum today.

As Chris points out, Pinterest is a search engine that will drive traffic to your site. As long as you use it in the right way.

Kate Spade and Wholefoods are good examples of brands that are using Pinterest effectively. And you don’t have to be a manufacturer or retailer. Pinterest works equally well for spreading ideas – as organisations like The Guardian and Enough Project have shown.

Getting started

If you’re a blogger, Yang of ChilliSauce has written this useful step-by-step guide.

Despite being a social media consultant, I have to admit I hate trying new stuff. Never enough time or patience. But Pinterest grabbed me right away.

We’d recently moved house and I needed home furnishing ideas. Boom! An online moodboard that can be instantly added to and shared – how damn convenient.

It was great to be able to collect pictures of furniture, decor and inspiration in one place, as I browsed. I was collecting ideas for my daughter’s bedroom so anything green and pink (like the dogwood blossom, pictured) got added. Each image behaves like a widget, linking back to its source, so there’s no issue with copyright.

Picture this

I found Pinterest easy to use and super-accessible. Clearly a lot of other people think so too, because Pinterest is growing at a phenomenal rate – currently more than four million users worldwide. Eighty per cent of those are women (although uptake skews towards men in the UK).

First came blogging, then micro-blogging, now photo-blogging. We’re increasingly busy in terms of the daily information we need to process: if a picture paints a thousand words, ideas can be communicated in an instant. It’s no wonder we’re seeing a rise in use of applications like Pinterest and Instagram. They’re of the moment.

Aspiration Nation – why we all want a piece of Pinterest

Photo: Laura Ockel on Unsplash