Pinterest might be the new kid on the block when it comes to social networks, but we shouldn’t let that new social network smell fool us. While the network boasts a measly 10.5 million users when compared to Facebook’s 850 million, its users are active, and they pack a big punch.

With closer investigation, it is easy to see why Pinterest has added such a unique perspective to the greater social landscape. Pinterest isn’t our average social network, and that’s exactly why it matters. Internet Marketing Inc., recently released an excellent info-graphic on the subject. Here are a few of the things that we learned from the graphic, and our own personal experience.

Get to know your Pinterest. This is important.

Female Strong

Did you know that 80% of Pinterst users are female ages 25-34?

It’s hard to believe that percentage, but this alone makes it a big deal. Pinterest is the only major social network with a majority female demographic. As of 2011, Facebook’s female demographic was somewhere around 48%. Not bad, of course, but far less than the plentiful 80% that Pinterest offers. Until Pinterest, most social activity was dominated by males – who notoriously make fewer buying decisions than women. Now, that matters!

Most Pinterest Users are from the midwest. Way to represent!

Midwest Appeal

Pinterest users are very likely to live in the Midwest. This is unusual. When it comes to online technology, the costal areas are usually first in line for adoption and use, but not anymore. The Midwest is no longer just fly-over country. It’s arrived, and it’s ready to pin.

Visual Focus

With Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, the message is usually text-based with links and images occasionally included. This isn’t the case with Pinterest. Users pin images, which are prominently display in a ‘pin-board’ style view. Images are the key ingredient, while text is very much secondary.

This not only makes Pinterest unique, but aslo vitally important for many brands to consider. The ability to post images will change the strategy of many social media managers. We need to think about our content in new, and more visual, ways. We need to make it easy for Pinterest users to want to share our brand’s images.

Pinterest is visual.

The visual nature of Pinterest is one of the reasons that retail brands have had so much success with Pinterest. With Pinterest, social media is more like window shopping and a bit less about building relationships. In our own office we have seen retail clients gain as much as a 70% spike in traffic and orders from Pinterest activity alone!

Pin It and Click It

One of the primary reasons to use social media is to gain traffic for your website. In the business, we call this the click-through rate. When it comes to the likelihood of someone clicking a link in our social media feed, Facebook is still king but Pinterest isn’t far behind. In our business, we have watched Pinterest become the next best source of referral traffic after the heavy hitting Google and Facebook.

Want traffic? Pinterst delivers.

The most important thing to note here is how Twitter has been left in the dust. Twitter makes big promises for website traffic, but even with 20 times the users of Pinterest – it fails to deliver. We can get just as much traffic from Pinterest’s 10 million users as we can from Twitter’s 200 million. For marketers, those are incredible numbers.

Weekends Matter

Just because our business stops on Friday, that doesn’t mean the Pinterest users do! Traffic to and from Pinterest is the highest on the weekends, which is very unusual and not at all characteristic of social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The short story for brands is: “yeah, we’re going to need to you go ahead and come in on Saturday.”

Mobile For The Win

One ongoing trend in social media is the growing use of mobile devices. It is no surprise that more and more users are visiting social networks on their phones and tablet devices. This trend applies to Pinterest as well. It is easy to browse and pin on the go. The big question is, how does our website handle the mobile traffic? Brands that care need to be mobile ready. It would be terrible to lose all the Pinterest traffic that will come to our website if our website isn’t ready for it.

Victory After Victory

A few other feathers for the Pinterest cap:

• Pinterest is retaining two to three times more engaged users as Twitter at a similar time in history
• American users of Pinterst spend an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes on the network. Compare this to an average 36 minutes for Twitter and a mere 6 minutes for Google+.

The scope of relevant social networks that can make a different in our business is growing. Google introduced the fastes growing social network in history just a few months ago. Pinterest is growing quickly, too, but the real success story is the new dynamic that it created.

Pinterest is a revolutionary social network with a different kind of dedicated user that brands and organizations should be a part of. Get busy, and get pinning.