What exactly is Pinterest?

 Yet again I am back with another social media platform that I am not familiar with. Alongside X, Pinterest is not a social media platform that I personally use on a daily basis. Maybe every once in a while when I want to compile a bunch of pictures together to convey an idea I have but that’s about it. Pinterest has been created as a visual pin-board style social sharing network where people discover and save ideas. Each of these ideas are represented as a “pin” and can be linked back to an online source. You can then save these ideas on a board to keep everything all in one place, as well as having multiple boards for each of your ideas or projects. Pinterest was founded in 2009 by three college friends Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and, Evan Sharp. Once they had their fill of messing around with different codes and testing different website options, Pinterest was finally launched in 2010! As of today in 2024, Pinterest has 465 million active users with their largest age group being 25-34 year olds. 67% of these active users being female, and 33% being male. The top 5 countries using Pinterest are the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Germany and France. 

Pinterest is pretty much a visual search engine. Like most other social media platforms it has a home feed, which shows the pins saved by people you follow, topics, categories, and boards you are or would be interested in. Each pin itself is usually a photo or video, with a description and a link back to its original source, and the pins live on a board that they are placed on. For example, even though this idea is way down the line in my future, I have a “wedding theme” board on Pinterest. There’s multiple different pins showing an array of colored floral arrangements, venues, dresses, rings, table set ups, you name it. And, each pin of these items is in very similar color themes. That’s just the big picture of it all, I can break it up into different categories. Along with that “wedding theme” board, I also have a “dress idea” board, “wedding rings” board, and a “wedding decorations” board. I honestly really like Pinterest, it’s just never the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about going on my phone. Not to mention with school and work, it has been way too busy in my life for me to sit down and think about wedding stuff. Especially when I’m not even engaged! But I’m sure almost every girl has an idea in their head about how they want their wedding to look, Pinterest just helps create that visual.