Hi guys,

you may already have heard about the latest phenomenon in social site or even be using it.

If you are – well done you are getting in on something very big.

Pinterest is described as a social photo sharing website but it is so much more than that.

A kind of of social bookmarking for pictures but with the “Friends” idea from Facebook and “Followers” like twitter and Voting Like Digg or facebook Likes and comments like blogs but much more real social sharing between users.

Only two years old it has already become the fastest growing Social site EVER and just entered the top ten social sites list with 11 Million visitors a WEEK and over 11 Million current members.

Pinterest

A bit like en electronic pin board (hence Pinterest) you simply “pin” any pictures or media from the internet, your PC or (re-pin) other members to your board. You can have as many boards as you like and group stuff by subject, type or style or whatever you like.

Why am I telling about this?

Well, All new mediums like social sites seem to promptly jumped on by internet marketers to further their own cause. This is an Internet Marketing blog so we need to talk about this.

I can see huge potential with Pinterest and I know some are already driving  a lot of traffic to there own sites and blogs with it.  You can get backlinks to your own sites, as with other social bookmarkings sites but with the “Likes” and “Re-Pins” you can quickly go viral with a popular subject. So I see this as very useful tool.

 

However words of warning. All new media sites get abused and take a period of time to settle while they change and toughen their rules to weed out the scammers, spammers, users and abusers.

Don’t be in that group!

Take a lesson from history and look at other great social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Those marketers that took on the spirit of social networking and focused on that instead of trying to make a fast buck are now reaping the befits of some pretty huge social networks of loyal followers that become happy and repeat customers. Think longer term and be prepared to put in the miles.

A second word of warning, look carefully at what you “pin”. Pictures and everything else on the internet tend to be copyright. Pinning a copyright picture to your board is the same as adding it to your blog and can get you into the same amount of grief.

Getty Images  for one are apparently looking closely at Pinterest because of it’s potential for copyright infringement and Getty make a lot of money by finding those infringements!

You can find Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/

Joining is by invitation only but you can request an Invite from their home page.

Oh, and one thing you NEED to know. The demographics of this site are little weird (in a cool way). It seems it is hugely popular with women. From Facebook statistics 97% of all Facebook likes for the Pinterest site are from women. Now that is a huge demographic and if you are in any niche that targets women (and that’s a lot of niches) then you should be looking very closely at Pinterest.

If you want to add Pinterest content automatically to your blog take a look at this cool WordPress plugin.  You can schedule pots of Pinterest to you blog and run the whole thing on auto-pilot. It doesn’t have to be your Pinterest content either, it will post from any board on Pinterest

CLICK HERE TO SEE PINTEREST WORDPRESS PLUGIN

 

 

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