Beyond Facebook: The Rise Of Interest-Based Social Networks
Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jay Jamison, a Partner at BlueRun Ventures, who focuses on early stage mobile, consumer and enterprise investments. He also serves on the boards of AppCentral, AppRedeem, Foodspotting, and Thumb. You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_jamison or read his blog at www.jayjamison.com. With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history, it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. The numbers tell the tale around users’ appetites for these new interest-based social networks. On Thumb, a community for instant opinions, user engagement has mushroomed in its short history. What accounts for the fast growth of these interest-based social networks, and what does it mean for Facebook’s future? Both. Excerpt image credit MignonGameKit.org
Pinterest Will Let Web Publishers Opt Out With Code
Pinterest is offering code that will let publishers opt out of sharing their site content on the increasingly popular social network. In an interview with LLSocial.com, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said users who try to pin from sites using the code will see a message telling them "This site doesn't allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!" Josh Davis, who conducted the interview with Silbermann, noted that the code won't prevent users from downloading images from sites using the code then uploading them directly to Pinterest. "I question how many sites will use this code, given the popularity of Pinterest, but Pinterest is trying to address copyright issues in a proactive way," Davis wrote. In the interview, which was published over the weekend, Silbermann also said the company had placed character limits on the captions for pins and had begun to outline its plans for monetizing the site.
26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business
Are you wondering how your business could use Pinterest? To say there’s been a lot of buzz about Pinterest in recent months would be putting it mildly! Pinterest’s ease of use for visually bookmarking, organizing and sharing things you love has made it a hit among individuals and businesses alike. What follows are 26 tips, an A-Z guide for creating a business presence on Pinterest. #1: Add a Pinterest “Follow” and/or “Pin It” Button One important way to let your clients and prospects know about your presence on Pinterest is to add a Pinterest button. Follow buttons are a great way to let users know you’re on Pinterest. #2: Brands and Pinterest While Pinterest hasn’t yet created a distinction between a personal profile and brand page (like Facebook), early adopting brands are making good use of their Pinterest presences and the pins and boards they’re sharing. *Note: Pinterest is one of the 60 new open graph websites and apps that allow a tighter integration with Facebook’s Timeline. #26: Zine
The Verge
What Pinterest means for the arts | Culture professionals network | Guardian Professional
There's been a deafening hype around Pinterest since it exploded on to the social media scene last month. Like the noisy new kid on the block it's impossible to ignore – have a quick look at #Pinterest on Twitter and you'll notice it's a little like Marmite; you either love it or you hate it. A cross between an image-sharing social network and a bookmarking tool, Pinterest works by organising or "pinning" images from anywhere on the web to a virtual personal pinboard. You can create as many boards as you want, on any theme – fashion, food, craft, architecture, interior design – then locate images and use a "Pin It bookmarklet" to stick them to your moodboards. Pinterest's social function is that users can re-pin items from other boards to their own and "like" or comment on things others have pinned. There's also an option to cross-share through other social networks. In the UK, Pinterest has closer to 200,000 users, but its success comes as no surprise. Go experiment and get pinning.
Five Ways Brands Can Leverage Pinterest Now
Editor’s Note: Reggie Bradford is the Founder and CEO of Vitrue, a provider of social marketing SaaS solutions. Follow Reggie on Twitter at @ReggieBradford and Vitrue @Vitrue. Pinterest is hot. White hot. The 2011 Crunchie award winner for Best New Startup has been on a roll lately, hitting almost 12 million monthly unique visitors and crossing the 10 million milestone faster than any previous independent site, according to comScore. And a new report from Shareaholic indicates Pinterest is already generating more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Reddit, Google+, and LinkedIn combined. The social content curation service has captured the attention of millions with a unique platform that allows users to express interests and ideas through visually appealing images on virtual bulletin boards. Vitrue has been following Pinterest closely as part of our normal vigilant assessment of the social space. Here are five ways brands can leverage Pinterest now: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
AntiMap | Creative toolset for recording & visualising data
Pinterest Has A Porn Problem
Why Pinterest Is So Addictive
I would have written this article sooner, but I was busy on Pinterest. If you are still among the uninitiated, the social platform for collecting, sharing, and commenting on of photos of personal passions is uniquely engaging, absorbing, and addictive. The human instinct to collect things--be it baseball cards, miniature spoons, or teacups--is as old as stuff itself. But it took Pinterest to perfect this process online. So no wonder it’s having a moment: comScore found that Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, who spend an average of 98 minutes a month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. But why would Pinterest, which has been around since 2008, be attracting such swarms of devotees now? Finding Your Happy Place and Sharing Your Ideal Self Dr. It’s more than just a critical mass of users, though, that’s driving Pinterest’s growth, says Long. Perfecting the Art of Collecting The proportion of the comments is also well-designed.
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