A new vocabulary has started to pop up all over the internet. Pinaholics are emerging in blog posts and news articles. People tell tales of sleepless nights, wide eyed, feverishly clicking away at their keyboard suffering from pinsomnia. They have developed a pinsession with the new giant of social media – Pinterest.

It’s not hard to see why. After being invited to use the site you create themed boards, for example an interior design board, or a photography board. Then you pin images you have found on the internet to those boards. You can also access a home page of people you follow on Pinterest and see what they have been pinning and “Repin” to your own boards. The simplicity of a pin makes the whole interaction very quick. See the image, pin it up, move on. It cultivates a hoarder personality and when you have collected all the pins you want that day you can view your board with a smug sense of satisfaction at your own impeccable taste.

It is a social networking tool so other people can appreciate your artistic flair and like, comment and repin. For personal use Pinterest is your digital scrapbook but its potential for businesses is also being realised as well.

As we have seen over the past few years, Facebook and Twitter have proved to be the new and sometimes only way to successfully market your business. The reason why social media is so effective is because it provides your audience with a personality. Your customers get to know the people behind the brand through the content you upload. Pinterest takes this to the next level.

Kyle Lacy, social media expert at KyleLacy.com says: “We are moving to a world where the split second capturing of a memory is more important than taking the time to write a ‘post’.”

A picture says a thousand words and with attention spans getting ever shorter Pinterest offers the answer. Businesses can use images of products that link back to their websites to draw in a wider audience and they can create boards that depict relevant images and interests that expand the sense of a person behind a brand.

“Because it’s images only, it takes the clutter of text and web pages away,” says Jennifer Levy, an interior designer in Brooklyn who uses Pinterest to share images with clients and to get inspiration for designs.

With over 10 million users Pinterest is fast becoming an established giant of the social media world. It is retaining and engaging its users 2 to 3 times more efficiently, on average, than Twitter was at a similar time in its life cycle. 80% of pins are “re-pins,” attesting the viral nature of the Pinterest community. By contrast, at a similar point in Twitter’s life cycle, roughly 1.4% of all tweets were re-tweets.

“It’s like getting a Sunday paper circular designed by my friends of things they like,” says Lori Choman, an avid user of Pinterest.

The potential of Pinterest is being recognised by businesses in the UK and US alike. As the site continues to grow rapidly, more and more people are seeing the benefits to having a healthy pinsession. Are you?

By Harriet Thacker

Harriet is currently working as an intern with Shake. You can follow Harriet on Twitter here or read her blog here.