Pinterest Popularity Makes a Case for Visualization

Pinterest Popularity Makes a Case for Visualization:from Business 2 Community by Chelsi Nakano
Last week, Pinterest showed the entire Internet love by opening up their sharing platform to all — no invitations required. It’s a great move for what statistics say is the fastest growing social start-up site ever (at least for now). Currently, the sometimes so-called “scrap-booking site” generates four times more revenue per click than Twitter, and a whopping 27 percent more per click than Facebook.
What’s in the secret sauce? A recent study by Netbase & SAP of over 5M impressions from online conversations — including more than 2.5M mentions of Pinterest in blogs, news articles and social networks – reveals the top five things people love most about the platform:

• 30% of Pinterest users are recipe sharers, and they claim the visuals, matched with social comments, really make them stand out
• 30% of the conversation praised how the site is beautifully designed and easy to use
• 20% of the conversation was dedicated to chatting about Pinterest’s growing popularity
• 10% of the conversation was about ease of use, particularly for planning and organizing events
• The last 10% of the conversation was about how quickly it becomes a part of a user’s daily routine

On the flip side, Netbase and SAP also covered the things users dislike the most. Aside from the usual (spam and technical issues), Pinterest users are most unhappy with copyright issues and the fact that the platform is a “time suck,” which ends up resulting in the loss of productivity.
What this tells us about the current user experience is nothing new, but it deserves to be repeated: people want dead simple and they want visual. Surely, Pinterest exploded because it was an original idea (rather than a copy of Facebook or Twitter), executed in the right way at the right time, but by keeping those two core values at the center, the the team behind it has kept their audience for a much longer period of time than most.
Check out Netbase and SAP’s stats in visual form in the infographic below: