Pinterest launched in March 2010, and although it experienced steady growth throughout the first 18 months of its lifetime, it has gone through something of a boom in recent weeks, and has quickly become one of the most sought-after social gimmicks on the web.

It borrows the principles of social bookmarking sites such as Reddit or StumbleUpon and applies them to images, or ‘pins’. Users profiles are virtual ‘pinboards’ populated by different images that they’ve discovered or uploaded, and images can spread across the site in a viral manner very quickly. Images can be divided into different boards depending on the categories they fall into, and similarly to Twitter, users can follow or be followed by other users. 

In the past two weeks, Pinterest has been recognised as the powerful traffic-driving site that it is, especially for photographers, hair stylists, craftspeople and designers. Business2Community notes the impact that Pinterest can have, using the example of a North Carolina-based stylist named Kate. Kate’s blog spent 8 months accumulating a meagre 7 readers, but she kept writing and eventually began to use Pinterest as a way of distributing images of her styles, linking users back to her blog for more information.

Over the past few months, Kate’s blog has skyrocketed, and now boasts over 10 Million page views, with her main driver of traffic being Pinterest. This kind of success is being replicated across the site, with other bloggers and entrepreneurs taking to Pinterest to display their wares and generate traffic using backlinks.   

Mashable reports that Pinterest has already become one of the top traffic drivers for retailers, currently ranking ahead of Google+. Hitwise tweeted recently to reveal that, according to its figures, Pinterest is currently the 60th most-visited site in the US, with an increase in visits from 10 million at the start of the year to 17 million last week.

Pinterest is already integrated into Facebook and Twitter, and even has its own Facebook timeline app to allow users to ‘share seamlessly’. Could we be seeing the true birth of the newest mainstream social network here? Only time will tell. If you want to get onto Pinterest, unfortunately you’ll have to join a waiting list for the moment. We’ll see you there!

Are you already on Pinterest? What do you think of it? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook, or post your comments below.  

 

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