Becoming a Person of Pinterest

Just what you need: Another time-wasting social media outlet, right?

But really, you have to try Pinterest. Especially if you are a creative, visual thinker.

What is Pinterest, you ask? It’s a collection of virtual corkboards, with pretty pictures “pinned” to them, organized by theme. It’s kinda like Twitter, but with images instead of words.

My friend Susie finally convinced me to jump on board (pun intended). I quickly became addicted. The house we recently moved to was last decorated in the early 90’s, so I utilize Pinterest mostly to browse and collect home design inspiration.

Those of you who are crafty and/or love cooking (neither applies to me) will go crazy. But there’s a lot of other fun stuff too. That’s part of the addictive quality of Pinterest: I find myself thinking, “I’m just gonna scroll down one more time…who know what I’m going to find next?”

Want to know how you can become addicted get started too?

• First check: Are you a girl? My observation is that approximately 99.5% of Pinterest members are female. If you are male, just make sure you feel confident in your manhood before joining. Or maybe choose an alias.

• Next simply sign up for your free Pinterest account here. When Pinterest first launched in the spring, you had to be “invited” to become a member. I think they were going for a prestige factor. Technically you still have to "request an invitation" to join, but now they pretty much let anyone join. (I mean, they let me in.) Once I received my invitation via email, I just signed in with Facebook. Super easy.

Beware Pinterest’s mysterious time-sucking effect

• Then download their little bookmarking thingy. That way, whenever you see a cool/pretty/funny/inspiring picture anywhere on the web, you can just use it to “pin” it to one of your “boards.” Or you can do what I mostly do, which is poach off the boards of all my fabulous design friends and “re-pin” their stuff.

• Make sure to read Pinterest’s etiquette page.

• Create some boards. You’re automatically assigned five pre-named boards. But you can easily delete those, change their names, or add more. 

• Now pick people you’d like to “follow.” It’s just like Twitter: You can follow someone, but they don’t necessarily have to follow you back. Pinterest will automatically generate a potential list of your friends (mine were from Facebook) who are already members. They also have a few other ways to search for people.

• Next time you log on to Pinterest, your home page will be filled with the latest pins from the people you follow. Or you can choose the Everything link to see what everyone on Pinterest is pinning. Or you can run a search by keyword.

• Let me know you’ve joined, and I’ll follow you!