Pinterest Invitation

Have You Received Your Pinterest Invitation?

Have you received your Pinterest invitation and, if so, are you going to accept it? If you are in any doubt as to whether to accept your Pinterest invitation then here are a few figures you may wish to chew over.

Pinterest registered more than 7 million unique visitors in December 2011 alone, up from 1.6 million in September 2011. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based content-sharing site Shareaholic, Pinterest is driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. Additionally, TechCrunch reports that Pinterest now has 11.7 million active monthly users, thus crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It also reports that Pinterest users now spend so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. If these figures aren’t compelling enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that in January 2012, the number of visitors on Pinterest had reached almost a third of those visiting Twitter and also that Pinterest’s rate of website traffic referral was close to that of Twitter.

The seasoned online ratings assessor Alexa is declaring that Pinterest has a global traffic ranking of 57 and in the USA alone ranks it at 19. This puts it ahead of well established major websites including CNN, MediaFire, AOL, ESPN and WordPress, to name a few.

The well known social media commentator Jason Falls reports in Entrepreneur that Pinterest already is driving buyers to some websites. In the last six months, the retail deal site ideeli.com has seen a 446 percent increase in web traffic from Pinterest and sales resulting from those visits have increased five-fold.

These figures and reports illustrate the dramatic rise of a fledgling site which The Wall Street Journal declares isn’t even sure how it is going to make money, quoting board member Jeremy Levine’s statement that “Pinterest’s monetization strategy isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table. We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet.”

Another issue with using Pinterest is that of copyright when uploading images. The Boston Business Journal, for example, stopped using Pinterest one day after setting up its account there after realizing that it could be sued for images it uploaded to the site.

Attempting to explain the growth of Pinterest and the reasons why a Pinterest invitation is usually eagerly snapped
up, Anthony Wing Kosner in an article in Forbes Magazine explains:

1) It’s a Fun Experience: There are lots of ways to consume content curated by other people, but Pinterest is a much more enjoyable—and lean back— experience than, for instance, Facebook or even Flickr. Many users describe paging through grids of sympathetically grouped pictures addicting. The fact that there is still room for new entries in the field suggests that despite their huge popularity, social networking sites have not created great content experiences.

2) It’s Easy: Pinterest’s bookmarklet makes quick work of responding to things you see online, which turns passive viewing into active curation.* It’s simultaneously a way to share and a way to remember what you’ve seen and liked.

3) It’s About Discovery, Not Search: As pointed out earlier on TechCrunch, we go to Google or Amazon, keywords in hand, when we know what we are looking for. But how we discover things we want in the first place is still wide open. Pinterest promises to be a one-stop-shop for anything we might want to discover (at least visually).

Additionally, Anthony Wing Kosner goes on to say:

The Content is the Navigation: Again, unlike Facebook, Pinterest has a lot less visible plumbing making it all work. Without the chrome, the ads and the news ticker you’re left just navigating a lot of beautiful pictures.

It’s About Interests, Not Friends: Instead of the emphasis on who you know that has been the backbone of social networks, Pinterest is all about what you like. Shared interests are only one aspect of friendship—we don’t necessarily pick our friends because of their curation skills. Ironically, the pinboards help you get to stuff that interests you quicker by sidestepping your actual friends.

It Creates Persistent Content: Unlike Facebook and Twitter that create fleeting timeline streams of content, Pinterest’s pinboards stay put. This is great for sharing and collaborating on image collections with other people, but particularly valuable to creatives or brands with something to sell.

Time will tell whether Pinterest will be the next mega social media success story and whether it’s success will endure, but for the moment the urge to grab a Pinterest invitation amongst social media users seems to be proving irresistible.

Let’s hear whether you’ve taken up your Pinterest invitation yet or intend to when you receive one or whether you intend not to because you’re dismissing Pinterest as an irrelevant sideshow and a bubble that is waiting to burst. We would love to hear what you have to say in the Comments box below.