Pinterest: Late to the Game

Oh, dear friends, I know Pinterest has been around forever in Internet terms, I just thought I didn’t have a use for it.

For those of you who, like me, occasionally live under social media rocks, Pinterest is basically a social media site for pictures. You can upload your own pictures, re-pin other people’s, comment, and like various images. You can follow users or boards.

So why have I finally decided to take the plunge?

Well. To be honest, I’ve been reading a ridiculous amount of marketing books lately (and marketing websites, and marketing newsletters) and after a while it all starts to get repetitive and starts making you want to shoot yourself in the head. But, in a change, one resource (I honestly don’t remember which at this point) said that they didn’t really know if anything would come of it, but maybe we should try Pinterest.

And I said, “Oh, Pinterest, that’s always kind of looked fun, so why not?”

And here we are.

But, to be honest, I’m really liking Pinterest. Admittedly, it was a little strange when Pinterest apparently told all of Facebook that I had joined, and many of my RL friends have strange obsessions with pictures of foods, but it’s kind of a treasure trove.

I’m a not a visual person–I don’t learn well visually, and I don’t need a lot of physical description in books or other written media–but I’ve found that going through a visual process, such as oh, looking for images that evoke the settings of my stories, can help me understand how other people’s brains work, and what helps them get the details they need to visualize.

Also, there are a gazillion pictures of trees and I really really like trees. ♥

I even put together a board for Shards, which is being released here on December 1st.

Do you Pinterest? (Is that the right term? Is it “pin” like Twitter is “tweet”?) What do you get out of the service? What’s your favorite thing about it?