One to watch: Pinterest

“As if the world needs another social media obsession”, I hear you cry. Well in our eyes, there’s room for one more in the form of Pinterest. This image-sharing platform was invented by self-confessed ‘collection nerds’, Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp. Their setup based in San Francisco was recently valued at a cool $200m – and it has only just been made available to the public.

Pinterest is basically a giant collection of pinboards created by you, and they act as a kind of ‘visual bookmarks’ tool. Sign up for a free account, install the ‘pin it’ bookmarking tool and every time you see an image that you love, you can ‘pin’ it to your notice board for others to see. Others can ‘like’ your image, and even ‘re-pin’ it to their own board.

There are many clever benefits from using Pinterest. Firstly if you’re into SEO, you’ll note that the pictures that you ‘pin’ will also give a link to the image’s original source. SEO experts already seem to consider Pinterest as a great way to create valuable backlinks.

Secondly, it provides a whole new way to appreciate and discover new objects and articles. By placing the emphasis on images over text, Pinterest turns the idea of search on its head. For instance, you want to shop for a ‘white shirt’, but what made you think you should be restricted to wanting a white shirt in the first place?. Searching for shirts may bring up a list of products from shops that you’d have never have known to visit. It’s also easy to go and look at white shirt images that have been hand-picked and pinned by other users.

To join Pinterest, you’ll need to request an invite from www.pinterest.com You can view (the very early stages of) our boards here.

Happy pinning!