Pinterest: A guide for the newbie.

I try to keep my head in the space of Social Media as much as I can. Partly because it’s my job, but largely due to the fact I love the industry and how it develops. It’s so full of innovation and fun. Over the past few months there has been one word constantly popping up all over Social Media blogs and news spaces, and that’s “Pinterest”. Heard of it or not, more and more people are turning to this platform to connect with, or rather organize, their digital world. The site quadrupled its users to 4 million in the last quarter of last year. So I went round, signed up and had a play. And here’s the run down.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest (a mash-up of the words “pin” and “interest”) is a place that lets you organize and share all the things you like and discover on the web. It’s sort of like a themed community pin board builder. For instance you might have a Christian inspiration Pinboard. Whenever you find a Christian website, image, video or blog post that inspires you, you pin it to that Pinboard. People have Pinboards for endless numbers of things like weddings, interior design, recipes, car modification, and online tutorials; basically any type of content available online can be created into a Pinboard.

Wait doesn’t that sound a lot like Bookmarking? That’s been around forever! Well it is….. and it isn’t. The differences between bookmarking and Pinterest are much the same as their physical equivalents. Although they will both mark something of interest for you, or someone else, for later referral, a notice board, like Pinterest, is a far more visual, interactive and community-focused way of highlighting stuff.

The other side of the Pinterest coin is that it allows you to browse Pinboards created by other people and then connect socially with friends or others with similar interests.

How do I use it?

Considering how cumbersome traditional bookmarking can be, Pinning is pretty easy with the browser extension. Once you’ve added the extension, you just click the button when on the page of interest, all the image/video options popup and you simply select the one you want. Assign the pin to one of your themed boards and you’re done. There’s also an iPhone app available (no android at this stage) that lets you take and Pin pictures of inspiration on the go. You can also re-Pin others’ Pins in a Tumblr sort of way. Actually talking to some colleagues today we figured that if Tumblr and browser bookmarking had a child and dressed it up like Instagram, you would get Pinterest.

Here’s a video from the Pinterest team on installing and using the Pin button.

The Good bits

The web is a mess. There’s no denying it. And any platform, tool or widget that helps people make personal sense of it is going to be a winner. Pinterest, for many people, is the Space Bag of their online playroom. It collects everything up into themed bags, vacuum seals them for easy storage, and then puts them on a shelf for later on, all neat and tidy

The ability to browse around and look at the Pinboards of others is a great way of finding quality web content on topics you’re interested in. Following other users and friends, a bit like Twitter, goes a long way as well for its social score.

Also connecting to your Facebook and other select networks is great for all you digital socialites.

The not-so-Good bits

One little gripe I have with Pinterest at the moment is that you can’t have private or group-only Pinboards. Being able to invite people to a Pinboard for a group project, or just having a personal space where you can visually collate your web discoveries, would be really handy. Just basic privacy stuff really. Apparently I’m not the only person to think these features would be a great idea and they may be just around the corner for the Pinterest developers.

The God Factor

What we love to do is find opportunity in Social Media for Christians to share their faith online. With Pinterest the biggest Kingdom building opportunities lay in that…

1. it allows you to organize the Christ centered content you may find on the web so you can be more on-purpose with any of your efforts to share your faith. And;
2. it allows you to highlight content to friends through the social engagement functions it has built in.

Is Pinterest a must-have tool when it comes to online evangelism or your general online social activities? Not really. Is it filled with opportunity and fun? If you want to bring some order to your online world and you love the ability to organize visually, then definitely!

Have you been using Pinterest? What do you think? Does it have potential to be used by Christians in sharing their Faith online?

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