Pinterest has been around for a while, but is growing more rapid lately. Some people find that surprising I think it all has to do with their invite and sign up procedure. Pinterest was, and still is, by invite only, this means that while starting out with a small group of people to work and test with, growth is only as big as the groups you started out with and the invites they send out. This gave Pinterest the time to get feedback, test, and optimize its features.

The larger the number of users, the more invites they will send out and the bigger numbers of growth it will generate. Slow at the start, allowing for feedback and optimization processes, faster now, generating a big fan base. The other good thing about this invite only signup process is the word of mouth principle that is generating interested users that most of the time are already introduced to the pinterest features by the ones that invited them. Add to that the brilliant way in which Pinterest users are guided through their sign up while being pointed out the features and lay of the land at the same time and you have great potential for stickyness.

Pinterest lets you ‘pin’ stuff on digital boards pretty much like real life moodboards. Playing into feminine habits of collecting pictures of themes like weddings, houses, interior designs and recipes, no wonder that 70% of the pinterest user base is female. Pinterest lately also started suggesting boards and people to follow according to your interest as well as adding the gift ‘button’ indexing every pin that has a price in its comments. But that is not why I really like Pinterest. The visual boards just also come in handy visually bookmarking your finds. This is how it works; you get to ‘pin’ a picture of choice from a URL and add a note to it. The picture is than added to a board named and categorized by you. This works beautifully for visual minded people like me. I can bookmark visually, which means I get to retrieve things lot faster than going through tags and text just because I usually remember things in pictures.  I also use Pinterest for searching things. Already when looking for things I tend to prefer Google image search over normal, it giving not as much results is the only drawback. Pinterest lets me search by themes and pictures and that works for me. Needless to say, I’m going to stick with Pinterest for a while.