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Pinterest

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All About Pinterest

What is Pinterest?

You may have heard people talking about Pinterest, one of the fastest-growing social networking websites today. While other social networks like Facebook and Twitter focus on personal sharing and status updates, Pinterest is all about collecting and sharing the different things you find on the Web. 

Screenshot of PinterestCollecting and sharing on Pinterest

How Pinterest works

Although we use the Internet to search for all kinds of information, it can be difficult to keep everything we find organized and accessible. Think of Pinterest as a sort of digital bulletin board or scrapbook for collecting the things you find online. For example, let's say you like using the Web to discover new recipes. While you can find an endless assortment of recipes online, saving them for future reference can sometimes prove difficult. You might not want to print out every recipe you find, and saving the links for lots of different recipes as bookmarks can start to feel a little overwhelming.

Pinterest makes it easy to save and organize whatever you discover online. In our example, whenever you find a recipe you like you could save that recipe as a pin. The pin is then displayed as a picture on a pinboard, creating a collection of different images as you add more pins. Clicking a pin will link you back to the picture's original website, turning your pinboard into a series of visual bookmarks.

Screenshot of PinterestA pinboard of recipes on Pinterest

But Pinterest isn't just about creating your own pinboards. It also allows you to follow the pins saved by your friends and other users, or pinners as they're called on Pinterest. Whether you're looking to find what's new or discover the latest trends, following pins is an easy way to explore what's happening on Pinterest.

Whenever you're browsing Pinterest, you can easily save, or repin, pins that you discover to your own pinboards. Repinning actually accounts for more than 80% of the pins that appear on Pinterest. Some pins are even repinned thousands of times. Simply put, people just love sharing and repinning on Pinterest.

Screenshot of PinterestRepinning a pin

Pinterest's popularity

Since its introduction in 2010, Pinterest has quickly become the one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. While some have been surprised to see a simple website like Pinterest become so popular, its simplicity is linked with its success. It's easy to start using Pinterest and make pinboards of your own.

Pinterest has also seen some of its largest growth from retailers and businesses. Because it is all about sharing different things you find online, companies are excited to see Pinterest users pinning their products. Retailers have also been able to use Pinterest to develop a brand identity by pinning items that are related to their business. For example, a hobby store might create a pinboard of interesting craft projects.

Pinterest by the numbers

  • Women account for about 65% of Pinterest's users worldwide, but the percentage of male users is rising.
  • Pinterest sees more than 11 million unique visitors every month, according to ComScore.
  • People in the Unites States are 70% more likely to buy an item they find through Pinterest than if they found it on a company's website, according to Shopify.

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