What is Pinterest all about?

Some of my friends have been asking me lately what is Pinterest? Why should I use it and what do I do with it? Well, to answer the question what is Pinterest, it’s simple: it’s an online pinboard or a virtual pinboard.

Have you ever used a pinboard? Have you ever been planning anything and thought “it would be handy to have a pinboard right now”? Pinterest let’s you do all of this online and help plan events, keep a record of ideas you have seen or just pin a lot of pretty things that you like! The great thing about it is you can do it on the web and on your apps and its a sharing community, so you can share other peoples ideas. I use iPhone and iPad, so this post will be passed on those apps.

Pinterest have this mission statement on their about us page, which I think says it all really, you add the things you are interested in and others can see it, share it and you can do the same to other people’s interests. It’s a social network for all the things you love.

Why do I use Pinterest?

I use Pinterest to pin photos that my husband takes for his business, Custardface Photography, photos of things I have made or find photos of things I want to make, other bloggers that I like and photos of baby products that I love and things I think are cool. I have 5 boards, 28 pins and 15 likes (at the moment)!

What’s a board? What’s a pin? And what’s a like?

A board is basically where you can pin your photos and interests, so it’s what you want to call your collection of interests. My boards are called: Custardface Photography, Bloggers, Crafty things on my list, Baby products I love and Cool family stuff.

You can take photos of things you are interested in or use your camera roll on the apps to add the images. I do both depending on where I am and what I’ve found. If I am out somewhere and see something I would like to make later, I use the app to take a photo and add it to one of my boards. If I find a photo online I can add it to a board by using the site. Or, you can do a really cool thing and repin other photos from other people’s boards to help your own collections. A pin is very simply the image you have pinned to your board and a like is the things you have liked along your journey.

You can use the apps really easily, the iPhone app is a smaller version of the iPad app, as you can imagine. You can search for people and pins, look at other people’s pins from looking in the search categories. If you find another user on Pinterest that you like then you can follow that user and you will be updated with what they pin and create on their boards. You can then like and repin those updates and network in that way.

The apps give you the opportunity to do it all on the go, so if you are planning a birthday party or baby shower, or just want to share images of things you do – you can do it all on the go. You can see at a glance what your followers have been doing and quickly search for things in the easy to use search facility.

So, get onto Pinterest by creating an account, which is so simple I think Noah could do it! If you have Facebook or Twitter you can create an account by clicking the button: use Facebook account or Twitter account and hey presto, your account is created!

Once you have created your account the search for “MummyConstant” under people and follow me… Look forward to pinning with you!!!

Go to the Pinterest website on your PC: http://pinterest.com/, download the apps via the AppStore and follow Pinterest on twitter @Pinterest.