The Pinterest love triangle

Pinterest.com is the newest visual social networking website on the block. But for many brand owners it poses as many threats as it does opportunities, as Helma van de Langenberg explains.

Remember when you had a scrapbook? You collected favourite recipes, nice interior images or dress designs, cut them carefully from magazines and glued them to the pages. With Pinterest you do the same, only online.

The social scrapbooking site allows users to build ‘mood boards’ (visual collages) of favourite and inspiring items from the web and organise them by topic or trend. Users can then share those mood boards with their friends, eff ectively building a social network by allowing users to share ‘pins’ and ‘re-pin’ the items they like on their own mood boards.

Pinterest was launched in 2010 and its recent rise has been spectacular: a year ago there werearound two million users; currently, there are more than 20 million active users. Th at number is still rising, making it one of the fastest-growing social media platforms ever.