Day: April 26, 2012

Pinterest is the latest entrant in the field of Social bookmarking. It is a social bookmarking site with a little twist. Pinterest is based on the concept of curation. It allows users to create visual collection of things they find interesting on the web. You surf the web and when you come across something interesting, you pin those onto something called “pinboards”. These pinboards are then organized based upon the theme like “Infographics”, “Places of Interest”, “Home decoration”, “wedding gowns” etc. These pinned items and boards can be shared with others. Other people with similar interest can follow you and like your pins and also can comment on it. So Pinterest is not only a social bookmarking and sharing site but also a acts like a social network site too.   In a very short span of time it has created quite a buzz in the Internet. A primary reason for the enormous success of Pinterest is because of the fact that basic human behavior has been transported to the web. Many of us during our teenage days, have created collages by cutting pictures of celebrities and visual ads and pasted it on the wall to feel cool. The same way we feel cool about sharing interesting stuffs on the web. According to founder of Pinterest the mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the “things” they find interesting”. And true to it’s mission it is helping like-minded people with similar tastes to connect with each other virtually. Few Facts about Pinterest Pinterest is co-founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp and was launched as beta among a closed group of people in March 2010, later on it opened up to public as invitation only. It is built in Python(Django), MySQL, Redis, Solr and Hadoop. Among the Pinterest users, 80% are female, 47% are between ages of 18-34 and 69% have household income between $25,000 to $75,000 per year. In a minute almost 1090 users visit Pinterest. Pinterest is the fastest growing social network site with more than 10 million users in 2 years since it’s launch. Pinterest became the third largest social network in US in March 2012. Jane Wang the most followed user in Pinterest with 2854609 followers is the mother of co-founder Ben Silbermann’s mother. Pinterest accounts for 3.6% of referral traffic almost same as twitter with 3.61%. So it is increasingly being preferred by brands. Uses of Pinterest Pinterest is the most efficient content creation tool. With Pinterest the social media has evolved from long form to push button publishing. The image below shows evolution of social media through various forms: Pinterest is used extensively by brands and online marketers to promote their products as it has got a high rate of referral traffic. It is used by users to plan wedding, decorate homes, saving recipes, finding styles, saving infographics, learning language development and lot more. Getting Started with Pinterest Before we let you know the tips to use Pinterest effectively, let’s familiarize with few pinterest based terms: Pin: A pin is an images attached to anything you share. The images may be from the ink you are sharing or can be uploaded. Pins can include a description also called caption. If the caption contains a price, then the images attached can have a diagonal bar showing the price. Repin: Once you pin a stuff on Pinterest, other users can share it, it is called repin. Board: Pins are organized into boards based on the theme. Each board can be considered having pins of similar theme or niche. Pinmarklet/PinIt Bookmarklet: It is a browser button which helps in pinning the stuffs on the Internet. Once you install the pinmarklet on your browser, you can just push on the button if you want to share something on pinterest. This will automatically grab an image and source link. Signing up with Pinterest Pinterest has not yet opened the registration for the masses. It is currently in invitation only. So in order to signup for Pinterest, you need to head over to the website pinterest.com and request an invite or ask someone who is already having an account in Pinterest. After receiving an invite you can register through Facebook connect or Twitter. Editing Profile After you are logged in to Pinterest, you can edit your profile. In order to edit your profile, click on your username at the top-right and click on Settings. You can see many fields like First name, Last name, Email, Passwword, Profile picture, Bio, Website URl, Location etc. which can be edited. Another good thing is that Pinterest allows changing the username any time you wish. Changing Profile Picture You can either choose to display your Facebook profile picture or Twitter profile picture. If you want to add your own picture, you can choose to upload an image from your computer and set that as your profile picture. You will see 2 buttons “refresh from Facebok” and “refresh from Twitter” near the profile image that helps in updating Facebook and Twitter profile picture as your Pinterest picture. Adding/Inviting Friends You can even find friends from other social network as well as your email contacts. Go to http://pinterest.com/invites/ and select the services from where you want to find and invite friends. After you select the desired service, you have to allow Pinterest to access the service. Creating Pin Board Boards and Pins are the heart of Pinterest. Boards or Pin boards are collection of pins belonging to similar theme or niche. The first thing you need to do after you edit your profile is to create few boards based on the things you like. Pinterest will automatically give you few pin board ideas, you can choose those or create your own pin boards. You can have boards like Places of interest, Recipe collection, Shades of my life, blogging resources etc. If you want to add new boards any time in the future, you can click on the Add button which will