A facebook friend of mine made a comment about Pinterest that I responded to. So, as you know, I was notified of all the follow on responses. I was really surprised to see this:

Wow! Really?

Immediately, I thought of five men who I follow on Pinterest.

Reg and Aaron are huge in the social media world. The other three (Lennon, Ryan and Rex) are my Oklahoma City friends, successful businessmen in their own rights.

I was relaying this information to David and discussing the different ways people are using Pinterest and remembered another friend of mine, Dan Gordon from Samuel Gordon Jewelers in Oklahoma City. He (note I said he and not she) held a Pinterest contest at Christmastime.

And then I had to know.

I know for myself, when I post a recipe or craft project from my blog to Pinterest, my blog traffic TRIPLES. Yes, that’s right, triples.

So I asked Dan how his Pinterest contest went over.  And he replied:

“I believe we had close to 40 participants pinning hundreds of items on the Samuel Gordon website.  SamuelGordons.com website traffic went up over 400% for close to 5 consecutive days. Then stayed steady at 200% up for at least 5 more days afterwards. Also, we had Twitter and Facebook posts of pics. Brand awareness exceeded expectations. Now My boards have taken on a life of their own and some days I go without pinning anything I get over a dozen pins or more even if I’m not on the services for multiple days on end.”

Wowza! Doesn’t sound like a sad woman who will never have any happiness to me.

Every day, I see a few more articles about how people are using Pinterest to grow their business, market their non-profit, or create brand awareness and I think it’s awesome.

Although I am currently a twitter user who uses twitter for its originally intended purpose, over the past couple of years, I used twitter (and other social media platforms) to grow my business. I am endlessly fascinated at the cleverness of people in business figuring out ways of using each new social media platform to their benefit.

Now, I will say that the young man who posted that Pinterest is for sad women is a college student and maybe isn’t old enough to know any better. But I sincerely hope he’s not a marketing student or maybe he needs to be paying more attention in class!