People have long collected photos out of magazines, pictures, fabric scraps and other inspirations in order to provide the creative spark needed in hobbies and event planning. In these earlier times, people would often use multi-colored thumb tacks to pin tiny inspirations to a cork board that was hanging on a wall in their bedroom, limiting only people who entered the room to see your inspirations. Now, Pinterest has combined collecting images with social media and therefore allows users to see others inspiration and findings and share their's with millions of other Pinterest users.

Pinterest has soared in its membership over the months and many business are profiting from engaging in the site themselves. But before you jump on the pinterest bandwagon, you need to find out if your company would benefit from getting involved with Pinterest. To find this out, the best way is to familiarize yourself with Pinterest users who would be your potential customers. We'll start with the stats of Pinterest.

Who uses Pinterest?

With over 60% of its users being female, Pinterest is clearly favored by women. Women from the ages of 17-65 use pinterest but women from the ages of 35-44 use Pinterest the most. Interestingly enough, 37% of the women using Pinterest have an average income of $25,000- $50,000. Thus you have to ask yourself, who are your customers? Would the majority of them fall into this category?

Why should you be on Pinterest?

In May of 2011 Pinterest had 418,000 U.S. unique visitors. This rose by October 2011 to 3,295,000 and then sky rocketing in January 2011 to 11,716,000. This made Pinterest the fastest stand alone site in history to ever reach the 10 million mark. Pinterest not only has over 11 million unique visitors, but the visitors keep coming back, thus driving more referral traffic than Google +, Linked In and You Tube combined.

Percentage of total referral traffic in January:

Pinterest       3.6%

You Tube    1.05%

Google +     0.22%

Linked In     0.21%

Is Pinterest right for your business?

That's the big question, isn't it.

If your target audience is mature women, chances are Pinterest is perfect for your business! Even if the majority of your customers are not women, if you are willing to go outside of your comfort zone and post things that aren't solely about your industry AND are appealing to women, then it could still benefit your business. Posts concerning news, trends and inspirations are a good place to start. Being on Pinterest has some marketing rules though. The content your posts needs to be completely marketing-free. Remember you are trying to build a relationship with 35-44 year old women by showing them visually stimulating images that your company may take an interest in. It doesn't have to be a product you sell or a service you provide. The objective is to have your posts "repinned" to people's virtual pinboards and shared throughout groups of people on Pinterest.

The fact of the matter is, Pinterest isn't for everyone, but it can be utilized by more companies than expected. To find out if your business should be on Pinterest, check out this infographic published by Software company Intuit.