Keeping Advertising "Pinteresting"

Businesses are taking advantage of a new social media platform; a bulletin board-like option for sharing favorite images. Pinterest was introduced in 2010 and allows users to organize and share images with their followers, quickly drawing traffic to their websites and blogs. Users "pin" images that serve as links to articles, blog posts, recipes, and e-commerce sites. But no one thought that this new platform would take off as quickly as it did.

Pinterest appeared out of nowhere, or so it seems. The platform grew from 1.6 million in September 2011 to 7 million in December of that year, according to Entrepreneur.com. And the majority of these unique visitors are female. This created a great opportunity for those businesses that appeal to this demographic. Magazines in particular, which rely heavily on visuals, took this opportunity for growth and traffic. Magazine websites even added a "Pin It" button their websites to help share their content.

E-commerce sites have received a lot of attention from Pinterest users as well. These sites have the ability to share their products on their own Pinterest boards, which link back to the online store. And it's easy for these images and products to go viral on Pinterest. According to an article on AdAge Digital, the platform ranks number three for most minutes spent online per month, behind Facebook and Tumblr.

From personal experience, it's easy to see how Pinterest has gained so much popularity in such a short amount of time. The site allows users to search images based on favorite categories such as DIY and crafts and women's clothing and accessories. And for those women who are planning a wedding, Pinterest has become a replacement for the infamous wedding binders by linking to wedding blogs and magazines.

I don't know that Pinterest would necessarily be strictly "advertising," however, I see the pins as mini ads. They serve as visual stimuli to attract users to specific websites and even include short captions to give a description of the image or let the user know who "pinned" that image and why. If correctly utilized, just as advertising copy, these short captions can provide websites with traffic not simply based on the visual.

Some people are saying that Pinterest may run into some issues down the road, but right now its doing wonders for the people in the creative world.