Pinterest - Disinterested or Pinteresting? All You Need to Know About the Social Media Platorm

There have been numerous articles where the fascination over Pinterest has been well documented, and how marketers can use the platform to generate traffic and business leads. Here is a culmination of various views on the latest social media craze that's growing faster than LinkedIn, Google + and YouTube combined! That's no easy feat.
So what's it all about? It was established in 2010. You sign up for an account and post images and photos to online pin-boards that you like. Share these images with friends and get people with similar interests to follow you (similar to twitter in that respect).
With any social media platform, there will be profitable angle applied to it at some point. Making a thorough check on the demographics of the site visitors is essential before embarking on any marketing campaigns. Females make up 80% of the total users. (source econsultancy). That's no surprise when you look at the home page. Everything is cute pets, fashion, shoes, dresses, nail designs. Unfortunately for me, I'm a male rugby player. Pinterest's home page does not engage me in the slightest. You will not find me spending 8 hours filtering through handbags, pretty pictures of cake and cute dogs, I did a search for rugby where half a dozen rugby photos came up surrounded by ladies clothing, which confirms my fears of it not being male orientated yet.
But before I write it off completely due to selfish testosterone driven stubbornness, there is a reason why millions of people are signing up to it everyday. Lot's of people like visual explanations and photographic proof unlike the content driven world of the search engine ranking positions. Marketers are signing up because they can leave a link in the 'from' section of any photo graph they use.
Marketing Drawbacks:

1. We get marketed to everyday. Promoting too hard will not work.
2. Business to business services can't always be promoted by an image on this platform.

Marketing Strategies:

1. Know your keyword searches for your market. This is what targeted people would type into a search to find your services.
2. Build up a following by sharing and re-pinning exciting images.
3. For your own images, they need to be engaging, comical, showing success, trending so that people re-pin them. You're own viral marketing.
4. What's on there at the moment being shared? Clothes. Simple, retail stands to profit the most from this as all fashion is visual. You won't get a photo of me typing HTML code into websites, link building and chairing meetings that will promote my business on Pinterest.
5. Offer incentives for re-pinning. (Similar to pay with a tweet on twitter). Special offers or competitions for people re-pinning.

Pinterest is going to be huge. How long it will stay around is anyone's guess as others have peaked and fallen away. Perfect examples include friends reunited which was the best thing since sliced bread and also MySpace which has had a resurgence in the music niche in recent months.