What does the Web’s hottest social network hold for data analytics?

Pinterest recently broke 11 million users this year. It was reportedly the fastest social network to reach 10 million unique users since its launch of closed beta in March 2010. However, that is somewhat in dispute, with many claiming that Formspring is still holds that title. Either way, there is no debate that Pinterest is growing at a phenomenal rate.

What is Pinterest anyway?

Since Pinterest headquarters is just down the Peninsula, I caught on to this site relatively early. However, a recent dinner with some out-of-town colleagues reminded me that not everyone obsessively follows startup news like I do.

Pinterest is a social network that links people together by their interests rather than their social circle. So unlike Facebook, which resolves around your friends, on Pinterest people express themselves and find friends through common interests. Another twist is that this is done via a metaphor of a pin board. Users “pin” photos that they find on site, from around the web, or uploaded directly to the site onto user-created “boards”. Users have boards to organize their pins into categories like “Travel” or “Humor”.

Since Pinterest is picture based, visual-type content show far better. Infographics, for example, are far more represented there than articles (some of which have no pictures to even pin). Brands are starting to take notice – Life magazine has a large following, posting mostly archived photos. Retailers are particularly strong here, since most of the items sold there are physical and therefore lends itself well to a pictorial presentation. In fact, Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and Linkedin. Combined.

So who is on Pinterest?

Modea, a digital advertising agency compiled some demographic information on Pinterest users and the results were quite interesting. On average, users spend 15.8 minutes “pinning” while Facebook users only spend 12.1 minutes liking things. Almost a third of Pinterest users have an annual household income of at least $100,000 and almost 70% are women with the majority aged 25-34. So young, upper-middle class and female – sounds like the demographic that advertisers will want to target. Of course, that is just the is the US. The demographics in the UK are decidedly different – 56% male, 29% in the highest income bracket and interested in venture capital (go figure).

However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t a good mix of interests on Pinterest. The Board of Man which is a board focused on more “manly” interests has 220,000 followers. Even the US Army has gotten into with its own set of boards which is managed by their Chief of Public Affairs.

It’s all about the data

Pinning is fun and all but the real value is the information captured by all those young and wealthy consumers. It’s also capturing a demographic that isn’t as prevalent on most of the social networks (meaning mostly male and on the coasts). Users are specifically stating their interests – in particular things that they covet or plan to purchase. In addition, the content is persistent. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, your pins stay present on the board for you to easily eview again later (and don’t come back from the dead as people discovered during the Facebook switch to Timeline). Retailers are starting to take notice – creating their own pages and engaging with users with interesting content.

Pinterest is still in beta so it has some things that I think it needs to add to become more robust.

• It really needs some sort of robust and standards based API (like REST). This will give websites the ability to better integrate with the social network. It also creates the capability for 3rd parties to start extracting some interesting data.
• An easier way to find people. It’s all about the interests and not friends but still, it’s impossible to find someone if they aren’t already friends with you on Facebook.
• Allow some pins to stand out in some way (either promoted or simply popular)
• Work in some additional content other than photos. While photos really enrich the site, having the ability to have music or text add additional context to the photos would be helpful.

In particular, an API in conjunction with other APIs would have the ability for developers to create some interesting apps in combination with Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. The mash-up of the Facebook social graph with the Pinterest interest graph would be quite interesting. Since the information posted on Pinterest is public by default and generated in real-time, it would be a good indication of the zeitgeist in terms of interests, which would be a welcome addition to the topic trends already occurring on Twitter.