Social media is the darling of the Internet. For the past few years, online user activity has been shifting more and more toward social media of all types, but recently it has truly become an almost entirely visual format. Gone are the days where text-based communications dominated the social scene. These days, it’s all about visual stimulation and contact through engaging pictures and videos. No website has made this more evident than Pinterest. Pinterest allows users to share photos and other media by “pinning” them to virtual pin boards. Remember the former popularity of corkboards? Pinterest has brought that concept online in a big way! According to Alexa.com, Pinterest is currently 15th in the United States and 34th in the world for traffic volume. The site gets a tremendous amount of traffic, and those users are known to visit the site regularly and to purchase products and visit websites they see there. In fact, MediaBistro.com compiled a report about social networking tools and discovered that almost as many people use Pinterest as use Twitter! In this guide, you’re going to learn how to make the most of this social media powerhouse, and how to use it effectively as a marketing tool. So let’s get started.