Like many people over the past few months I have become more enamoured with the Pinterest each time I visit. The site is now a daily along with my staples (email, Facebook and LinkedIn).
On my initial visit I was reminded of del.icio.us when they first came out and how I quickly moved all my bookmarks to the site as well as searched through what others were bookmarking.
A quick peek at the redesigned delicious site, re-launched in September last year, shows quite the resemblance to Pinterest which launched in March of 2010.
As Pinterest continues to grow many people have quickly followed suit launching similar sites like Pinspire, vi.sualize.us, We Heart It and FFFFound with more popping up daily.
Marketers and Investors Are Taking Notice
As highlighted in TechCrunch, early adopters to Pinterest are not your typical tech-obsessed early adopters. Investors see the same trends, which is why they think Pinterest is only at the early stages of its growth.
Recent stats show in Pinterest over took Etsy for unique visitors (below) with a giant spike in the summer of 2011. Taking notice, Etsy just announced the addition of a Pinterest Pin It Button to their listing pages.
The sites large draw isn't lost on Real Simple who says Pinterest is driving more traffic for them than Facebook. A lot of businesses are getting involved in Pinterest, mostly from what I've encountered they are either personalities (Paula Deen, Nina Garcia, Michael Kors) or products/retail company (Bob's Red Mill, West Elm, Nordstrom) but it is just getting on the radar for many B2C and B2B marketers.
Is Curation King?
Elad Gil (Director of Corporate Strategy at Twitter) wrote a blog post recent which highlights the mega trend of social media: evolving from long form to push button and asks Is Social Content Curation The Next Big Thing?
And if isn't the next big thing, is it a replacement for what we've already got? Is Social the new SEO? Clay Shirky once defined curation's role this way: "Curation comes up when search stops working". More on that and an interesting analysis by Mathew Ingram from GigaOM when he reported on the recent Google changes. Looks like they are catching on to what Scoble called The New Billion-Dollar Opportunity in September of 2009.
Are You Ready To Join?
Here are 9 tips for boosting your business on Pinterest and once you've got rolling 13 tips and tricks for cutting edge users. Search Engine Journal says one should “think of Pinterest SEO in terms of linkable image assets.” Since all pins are links, they show up in Google search results. To leverage Pinterest for search, add a pin it button to your site for each product, use appropriate tags in pin descriptions, and make sure your pins and boards have titles that have relevant key terms.
All your Facebook and Twitter who are on Pinterest contacts will automatically be loaded and you will be sucked in immediately. And for hours. Don't say I didn't warn you.