Pinterest now 3rd most popular US social networking site

MANILA, Philippines - Pinterest, a pinboard-style social photo sharing website, is now the third most popular US social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter.

A recent report by Experian, a US marketing services company, underscored the snowballing traffic to Pinterest which is largely driven by girl-power.

Launched in March 2010, Pinterest lets users upload images known as “pins” and organize them by creating theme-based pin boards for their hobbies, travels, pets, wardrobe, etc.

All photos are discoverable by other users as all pins become part of the one big pin board that is Pinterest. Users are welcome to “follow” other users or to “like” or repin others’ images, leave a comment, and to share their pins on their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Videos can also be pinned, but this two-year-old social bookmarking site is predominantly a picture platform.

Pinterest has proven to be especially popular among women made obvious by the fact that the uploaded images are largely related to home décor, crafts, holidays, fashion and food.

Experian said majority of the site visitors are female (60 percent) who are mostly between the ages of 25 and 44. Among them is Michelle Obama, the 48-year-old US First Lady, who started pinning her happy family snaps this month. Other famous pinners are Oprah Winfrey, Ellen de Generes, Jessica Alba, and Martha Stewart.

From July last year to January this year, Pinterest had accumulated nearly 21.5 million total visits, which was 30 times the number of total visits during the six-month prior.

In addition, Experian reported that Pinterest enjoyed a 50 percent increase in traffic from January to February 2012 and recently came out as one of the top 10 websites in the Hitwise Social Networking and Forums category.

While Facebook keeps its strong lead of seven billion visits by the end of March 2012, Pinterest’s 104 million visits came near within Twitter’s 182 million. Not bad for a site that was still in beta just two years ago.

Another report, this time by ComScore, noted 11.7 million unique US visitors to Pinterest last January, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10-million unique visitor mark.

ComScore’s State of the US Internet report puts Pinterest’s growth at a remarkable 4,377 percent last year compared to other established social platforms that posted modest growth such as Tumblr (168 percent), LinkedIn (67 percent), Twitter (58 percent), and Facebook (four percent).

Experian believes Pinterest is one if not the hottest social media start-up since Facebook and YouTube and the one to watch especially by retailers.

“The popularity of Pinterest is a result of the next phase of the behavior we have seen online over the last few years. Users are increasingly more comfortable with recommendations from friends or other users when they come through social personalization,” the Experian report stated.

“While Facebook continues to be a social juggernaut, Twitter is also growing, and Google+ is making a serious go of it. A new class of social tools, including Tumblr and Pinterest, continues to enable customers to compile and share their interests online, and businesses should tap into that trend,” the report added.

Founded by Ben Silbermann, Pinterest is managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors. It definitely offers something for everyone, but draws the line at nudity.

It also encourages and usually automatically provides the link source for pictures that users upload from the Web to protect copyrights. Once you have been invited to join Pinterest, it will e-mail you the “Pinterest Etiquette” of how to be respectful, authentic and above all, how to credit your sources. But these are not enough to prevent copyright problems to be pinned — pun intended — at the start-up’s door.

One basic argument against Pinterest’s method is consent — indicating and giving credit to the original source of an image does not mean there’s explicit permission from the owner to pin it.

Things like this are now part of Pinterest’s birth pains and the reason why the Silicon Valley’s hottest company has just hired former top Google lawyer, Michael Yang, as its general counsel.