What is Pinterest all About? Why Should I Care?

Pinterest has become a popular site for many individuals who collect images that help them plan, organize, and explore any topic of interest.

3 min readJun 10, 2021

It’s a question I get asked all the time: What is Pinterest all about? It’s certainly more powerful than most people think. And yes, it’s good for just about anything and anyone!

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo-sharing website that launched in March 2010. A pinboard is like a giant bulletin board where individuals can collect ideas. Pinterest extends this idea to the digital realm and has made it possible for individuals to create smaller bulletin, or pin, boards dedicated to specific topics, themes, or subject matter.

For example, an individual interested in cars can create one pinboard dedicated to just cars generically. Or they can create a board for smaller sub-topics, like the 1962 Chevrolet Corvette, or tires and rims. Since its inception, Pinterest has become a popular site for many individuals who collect images that help them plan, organize, and explore any topic of interest.

What is Pinterest all About? Image Search!

To help individuals collect pins related to specific topics Pinterest relies on quality visuals, because “sometimes you don’t know what you are looking for until you see it” (Pinterest, About, 2016). Pinterest’s pages display larger images and a small amount of text that lines up in a square format, like an individual would do to line up ideas on a bulletin board.

Pinterest’s Bulletin Board Format

The company has added new features over time to grow and expand the software’s potential and evolve as their audience adjusted to using this online content curation service. For example, the company added a button that integrates with the web browsers the individuals use to navigate the internet, so that ideas could be saved from any website, not just the Pinterest website or their mobile device application. Pinterest also now uses what they call “descriptive guides [that] help steer your search in the right direction” to help better link common interests, values, and ideas (Pinterest, About, 2016).

What is Pinterest all about? It’s a Different Sort of Social Media Site

The interesting part about Pinterest is that it is a social media site where the user does not have to stay on their profile page all day long. That makes it different from other social media sites, where interactions stem from profile page to profile page. The similarity to other social networking sites lies in the activities of being able to like, re-pin (or share), and follow others.

Pinterest seems to have managed to find a very visual way of connecting audiences with products and services, which helps to drive traffic to websites where the audience can make a purchase decision, get informed, or save the information for use at another time. This platform seems to have found a way to provide marketing value for businesses by linking common interests, while still catering to consumer needs, interests, and values.