Have you found anything pinteresting while browsing the web, your favorite blogs, online shopping? Then “pin” it, millions of users (mostly women) are doing it, and Pinterest has quickly become the fastest site in history to break the 10 million user mark according to a recent comScore report, reviewed here by TechCrunch. I created an account after all of my girlfriends kept raving about it and I wanted to see what all the hype was about. I have to admit that at times the content “pinned” by users can be a bit girly for my personal taste, nails, designing outfits, dream weddings, but I suppose that’s to be expected with the user demographic. However, there are a fair share of users that post a lot of the content that I am interested in, design, architecture, food, photography, and I can imagine as the site continues to expand their user base that the variety of content will grow even more. I have to admit Pinterest is extremely addicting, and it serves as a great way to bookmark ideas when you are working on a project.
At work I’m managing the addition of a Pinterest page to our social media mix, and as expected it looks like quite a few brands are adding Pinterest boards of their own as well. Pinterest is going to pose an interesting challenge for brands, as the site is intended as a place for inspiration, not self-promotion. Brands will have to have to focus on what inspires their products, their corporate culture, their brand. This will pose plenty of opportunities for fashion and design based brands, but could be a bit of a challenge for more traditional and less creative based companies. Brands have found a way to integrate into the other top social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube rather easily and while social media presents an ever-evolving learning curve for brands I think it will be very interesting to see how brand boards evolve over time.
