Harris Fellman Live Life To Its Fullest

Modern Day Pin-Up Girls

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, the time has come.

I think of it as a “Visual Twitter”… my friend Rob Toth called it a “Visual Social Bookmarking Site” (like Stumbleupon or Digg, but more visual). However you want to look at it, Pinterest has really taken off in the last year.

I should’ve known something was up when my non-technical yet very artistic mother asked me “have you heard of pinterest” about 6 months ago. Now, you’ve got to understand – I had to convince my mom to get an iPad because she was afraid it might be too much for her to learn … and then 3 months later she’s asking me about Pinterest… in fact, to further demonstrate her non-techniness, I should tell you that she also joined Facebook for the first time for the sole purpose of being able to use Pinterest. HELLO!

Then a couple months later, my very Savvy Sassy wife, Andrea, also started using (and loving) Pinterest… a couple weeks later she told me to put up a “Pin It” plugin on her wordpress blog. The one that was available didn’t work with her theme. I kind of ignored Pinterest myself (like I did with Twitter at first). I mostly ignored it because it was billed as being “for women”.

When I finally checked the site out a couple weeks ago, I began to understand why it’s become so popular. It’s very addictive to be able to just scroll down a page of pictures and click on the ones that catch my eye. (Hmmm, is that why I called this post “Modern Day Pin-Up Girls”??? Or is it because the Pinterest audience is about 90% female right now?)

So, anyway, I have a few thoughts to share with you… and I’m curious to know what you think?

• Amazingly, very few marketers have found out about Pinterest yet.
  Now that it’s a top 100 Alexa site and top 10 Social Networking site according to Hitwise, that’s bound to change.
• If you have a business and sell product, you can pin your coolest products up, put a price-ribbon diagonally across the picture, and link back to your website for quick purchase. (SWEET).
• You can even sell stuff that’s not yours. Some people are already pinning up pictures of a product and then linking back to it on Amazon though their affiliate link. Smart. (I’ve heard Amazon is working best for this… books, products, etc.. not-so-much for other affiliate programs. But whatevs.. try what you know – don’t over do it).
• Whenever I start off on something like Pinterest or Twitter or Facebook… it always starts off as manageable. Then it grows to “too many things I’m following” .. right now, I haven’t followed enough b/c I’ll go look at the Pins twice a day and quickly get down to ones I’ve already seen.
• As of today, Jan 22, 2012, they have about 6.6 million users and 620,000 likes on their Facebook Page. Also, according to Quantcast, they have about 1.9 million users a month (prob not unique users) and 16 million page views with 78% of the users being considered an addict.
• Tons of clone sites out there already too. Although clones often don’t do as well as the original, this is very much worth watching as a trend. The layout is very eye catching and addicting and has some other uses I can think of for some other verticals. So, if you’re an entrepreneur who likes building on existing trends rather than getting all the arrows to the back like the pioneers — you should be paying heavy attention to Pinterest.
• It’s skewed “very female”, however I see no reason why men won’t love it, too. So, probably a big growth opportunity there. Plus, it’s just at the beginning of it’s viral growth curve.

Bottom line: If you’re a marketer, you owe it to yourself to really check Pinterest out. I’m sure there will be plenty of Pinterest Plugins and Marketing tools that allow you to leverage the growing power of Pinterest.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome below.