In November 2012 the creative geniuses over at Pinterest launched a hot new feature, "secret boards!" On Pinterest's official blog, they say, "You can use secret boards to keep track of holiday gifts, plan a special event, or work on a project you aren't yet ready to share with the rest of the world." Like most people when I first heard the news I was elated! Now I could pin all of those guilty pleasures and nobody has to know about it! Single women don't have to feel guilty for creating a wedding board. Users can create gift boards, date idea boards, or a board devoted to your boarder line creepy obsession with Johnny Depp. Yay! Everybody wins. Except, maybe not. On a personal level secret boards are great, awesome even magical! But on a business and professional level secret boards are not the greatest invention since sliced bread especially for retailers, photographers and bloggers. These professionals rely on other people to keep pinning their product. For example I follow American Eagle, I log on to see that they just pinned a new pair of boots they are carrying I like them so I'm going to pin them but instead of pinning them to my "Style" board for everyone that follows my board to see (as well as anyone who clicks on the Women's Fashion tab where my "Style" board could randomly pop up) I instead pin the boots to my secret "gifts" board American Eagle potentially lost 100's if not 1000's of views. The same could be said about photographers who get lots of pins into "Wedding" boards but if people start creating secret "Wedding" boards the amount of times their pictures will get re-pinned will cut down. Also bloggers who talk about DIY and cheap wedding ideas their traffic will slow if people don't keep re-pinning so that their followers will see the link and re-pin again. Secret boards have been out for a couple of months now and I haven't heard any negative feed back about them thus far but I can see this developing into an issue. Luckily each user is only allowed 3 secret boards and it is impossible to make an already created board secret. Also if a user has created a secret board it is possible to make it public later on so when that single girl finds her soul mate she can switch the settings and let the whole world know she's off the market! How do you feel about secret boards? Do you love them or hate them? What are some good uses for secret boards?

Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site in the history of the internet. According to Jason Miles and Karen Lacey, authors of the book, Pinterest Power, it grew faster than Facebook,  YouTube and Twitter. As a business owner or public relations or marketing professional this website cannot be overlooked. Already businesses of all sizes have increased sales and revenue through using Pinterest. Businesses such as ModCloth, Berda Style and Lil Blue Boo have attributed much of their success to Pinterest. 

Holiday shopping traffic from Pinterest doubled in December 2012 from December 2011, and now counts for nearly 10 percent of all traffic from social stores. While Facebook still dominates social e-commerce referrals, its share dropped 5 percent to reach 90 percent. And despite Twitter’s claims to the contrary, according to this study based on RichRelvance’s analysis of 490 million shopping sessions which took place in 2012 and 2011 during a ten day period beginning on Thanksgiving, Twitter contributed less than 1 percent of Social E-commerce. (http://www.richrelevance.com/blog/2012/12/holiday-insights-2012/)

One of the main reasons why Pinterest is growing so quickly is because businesses’ content keeps working for them months after they have “pinned” or posted it onto Pinterest. Unlike Facebook and Twitter where the user must constantly be making posts or tweets users on Pinterest can let their content do the work for them. According to Miles and Lacey, over 80 percent of pins are repins; this means that the followers and their followers and their followers will do the marketing for you. 

To view the PDF info graphic published by RichRelevance click on the document below.