Get Pinterested in Tea

Where do you draw the line when it comes to social media? There are only 24 hours in each day, and if you sign on to every one of the zillion or so sites coming down the pike, you’d probably use most of those hours on social media. But every now and then there’s a phenomenon that catches on in a way that’s kind of hard to ignore – or resist. If you tend (like me) to often be a step or two behind the curve when it comes to social media, an introduction to one of the latest phenoms – Pinterest – might be in order.

Our esteemed editor on Pinterest (Photo source: screen capture from site)

For succinct descriptions you probably can’t do better than this one, from the good people at Pinterest itself:

“Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”

Here’s a Forbes article from a few months ago that already sang the praises of Pinterest for online marketers.

Pinterest is essentially broken down into three segments. “People” is pretty much self-explanatory and “Pins” are the images that these users of the service choose to share. A “Board” is simply a set of Pins that that a user can gather together on any topic – including tea. Pinning, repinning, and liking should be fairly self-explanatory to anyone who’s used social media.

So what about tea, you might be asking yourself. Well, glad you did. The array of tea stuff here is as wide ranging as it might be for any other topic, but there are a few themes that seem to be especially common. A lot of the tea-related Pins (but not those of our esteemed editor) I’ve been seeing seem to be geared toward celebs and other famous types drinking tea. Perhaps it would be bad manners to point out that in many of these cases those mugs and cups might actually be filled with coffee, but I digress. Pins of teaware, whether it be the cutesy novelty type or not, are also quite numerous, as are graphic/slogan combos, in varying degrees of cleverness, that promote the notion that tea is a good thing (agreed).

To see what kind of tea stuff is on Pinterest simply type a search term in the box in the upper left section of the page. This will bring up links to a set of Pins, Boards and People (and yes, Tea is apparently a more common woman’s name than I realized) for whatever specific term you’ve selected. From there, as with all social media, it’s simply a matter of forcing yourself to disengage before you’ve blown too large of a chunk of time.

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