“Remember that thing called Pinterest? Yeah, What happened to that?” appeared as the status of one of my Facebook friends recently. My answer: Pinterest hasn’t gone anywhere. Though some people see it as a passing fad, Pinterest is still here and a force to be reckoned with in the marketing world.

Pinterest uses the high levels of engagement with photographs to its advantage. Our post What’s in a Photo That’s so Engaging? states that 70% of all social media interaction contain an image and 89% of Facebook activity involves photographs. To give images an edge, Pinterest embeds links in them to connect the image to its respective origin. The links contained within the images can drive web traffic. According to Social Barrel, the average Pinterest user spends 77 minutes on the site daily, compared to 12.1 minutes on Facebook and 36 minutes on Twitter. In those 77 minutes, we can only estimate how many times a user will click an image and be driven to a website.

This past September, Pinterest passed Yahoo! in the ranks of biggest driver in organic traffic to now be the fourth largest in the world. Through the use of Pinterest, brand’s have the ability to increase traffic to their sites exponentially as it already drives more traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.

A high quality of traffic is a key characteristic of Pinterest. Social Barrel reports that a Bottica.com study found that Pinterest users spend roughly twice as much as Facebook users. With this type of high quality traffic, a higher revenue is also generated. According to Convert CEO Jeffrey Swelling, Pinterest accounted for 17.4% of social media revenue in the first quarter of 2012 for e-commerce sites. In fact, Pinterest drives more revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter despite it being ranked behind them.

With Pinterest having the ability to be a large generator of revenue, businesses need to hop on the wagon and start pinning away. With each “repin” to a follower’s board, a web of connections will be created expanding the reach of potential consumers. When a follower repins something, their followers see it in their feed and have the ability to repin it themselves to continue the cycle. Pinterest has also connected to Facebook and Twitter harnessing even more potential to increase revenue, web traffic and even brand awareness.

Pinterest is also an effective tool in promoting the lifestyle of your brand. Consumers connect to a brand when they see what they could have by using the product, a depiction of their potential and coveted lifestyles. BzzAgent’s Pinterest features several boards of ideas from Agents during their BzzCampaigns that can be implemented by other Agents. Pins can depict a certain scenario while integrating your products, drawing in the consumer and creating a connection.

Creating a connection with consumers and how to optimize your Pinterest page is all explained in Pinterest’s educational guide specifically for businesses. The site now offers business accounts that appear the same as any user’s. Despite appearing similar, businesses have the advantage of the guide to give them an extra hand in marketing themselves. The educational guide describes ways to tell your brand’s story, build a community, drive traffic and, most importantly, how to learn and grow from your consumers.

Pinterest is not dead. Instead, it is a platform that, if cultivated correctly, will help grow a business in multiple key metrics. For those of you that think Pinterest is of the past, take your accounts out of hibernation and start putting a pin in it.

When everyone was making their social media predictions for 2012, many pointed to the rise of visual storytelling.  For example, on Social Media Examiner, Jay Baer said that “multimedia social networks are here to stay and will be an emerging force for brands in 2012”.  And he was right. Pinterest has become the fastest growing standalone site ever. It’s now the 3^rd largest social media network, only surpassed by Facebook and Twitter.  According to comScore, traffic has grown 4377% since May 2011 and it now attracts 31.9 million unique visitors a month.

It’s not just the size and growth that make Pinterest important for marketers. It has a great ability to drive high-quality customer engagement. So from a marketing perspective, this is can be one of your best social media tools.  Since marketers are trying to figure out how best to use Pinterest, we thought we’d share a few lessons from our brilliant community manager BzzAgentJono. Here are some of his suggestions for getting your bzz on with Pinterest:

Adding Customers as Contributors

Jono has empowered a group of Agents to help shape our Pinterest page by adding them as contributors to the site. They are helping us represent our brand, and they’re happy to do it.  We utilize their strengths and expertise in a category, like baby products and parenting ideas. Every day they pin interesting and thought-provoking content on their topics to pages like this.  It’s a win-win. We get great content to share with everyone and they build their own personal brand as experts in the category.  It’s a great way to excite a key segment of our community.

Making it a Competition

Another way of engaging with your audience is to make a competition out of it. Recently, Jono asked our community of agents to compete in creating the best pinboard describing what it means to be a BzzAgent. Agents now have their eyes on the prize- a 50$ Amazon gift card. New boards are constantly popping up, and we’re gaining new followers every day. Our community is curating their own boards about our brand and creating content to share with others. It’s a great way of spreading word of mouth.

This isn’t all just fun and games though. Pinterest activity influences sales. The social media network has become a significant source of referral traffic to e-commerce sites – driving more traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.  But for Pinterest to really become a powerful marketing tool, an API is needed so marketers can get more data on activities.  Fortunately, it’s on the way. Cat Lee from Pinterest’s Platform team says they are “actively working to make the API available soon”. But don’t wait, Pinterest is a social marketing opportunity that can’t overlooked.

What are some of the unique and fun ways you’ve seen brands use Pinterest?