It's also why I've written about some social media platforms early on in their existence, like Tumblr, Groupon and Pinterest. Like all of these new tools, it takes time for businesses to climb on the bandwagon and try using them. Similarly, it takes time for the platform to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. That's' why I think Pinterest has ripened enough to give agents some solid ideas for leveraging it.

A thousand words

I've written a lot about the power of the visual, of how images convey so much more information than words alone. It's always been my contention that the most effective messages incorporate imagery. I believe that's why we're seeing so many social media platforms built around images or video. Just consider Twitter's Vine or Instagram's new video feature; the move to incorporate video, even if only in 6-second increments, illustrates the direction in which marketing is heading.

So it's no surprise that Pinterest is among the top most powerful social media marketing platforms out there.

Pinterest was among the first social media tools that truly leveraged pictures to allow people to “collect” on virtual pin boards images of things and information that are of interest to them. It began as just a way to share groups of images (photos, graphics and now, videos) with a common theme.

Related: Read: “Make a Scene With Vine“

Businesses that sold products were among the first to try Pinterest as a marketing platform by pinning pictures of their products and their products being used: wedding dresses on brides, food presentations by restaurants and more. Real estate agents might pin ­pictures of their listed properties and could ­collect them on boards by town or type of property.

I've been pinning for a little more than a year and my most active board is “All thingsMoonriseKingdom” which curates everything I come across about the movie my son was in. Because of the strong following of the movie and Wes Anderson as a director, whenever I pin something to that board, within 15 or 20 minutes at least one or two people like it and re-pin my pin or choose to “follow” my board. Then inevitably a little bit later people re-pin much older pins from that board or other boards I have.

VentureBeat.com blogger John Koetsier posited, “…the half-life of a Pinterest pin is thousands of times longer than a tweet or Facebook post.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Tweets are, by their very nature, fleeting. If you watch a Twitter feed on a website, you need to read fast or you'll miss something. As with Facebook, if your news feed is set to show recent posts up top then only if someone adds a comment to an older post will it pop back up top again. Otherwise you have to go scrolling, if you're at all interested.

Most social media platforms that have the “post” component to them, used to trigger you to post by asking a question that was very much in the moment. Now both Twitter (“Compose new Tweet…”) and Facebook (“Write something…”) use a very generic, non-directional trigger.

With Pinterest, there's none of that. You can place a “Pin It” button in your browser's bookmark bar so if you're on a site that has something you want to add to one of your boards, all you need to do is click the button. Pinterest will locate all the images on the page and offer them up for you to choose from as the one to associate with your Pin. Remember that Pinterest can't distinguish advertising images from content images, so be careful to pick the right one. You then can add some comments and a link to your website.

Insurance on Pinterest

Pinterest helps you give insurance a human face. We all understand how dull and dry the subject of insurance can be to the layperson, which makes it difficult to get people to by attention unless there's a loss or some other event. By reminding people about the things that insurance protects in a very compelling manner through visuals, they will begin to associate the important things in their lives with protecting them.

Related: Read “Agents: 'Like' New Media“

I was going to give you some examples of how insurance agents are using Pinterest to promote themselves and the things they care about, but there is such a wide variety that I thought it best to have you just do some searches on Pinterest.com.

I just did three different basic searches and came back with lots of results.

• Homeowners insurance – 60 boards
• Auto insurance – several ­hundred boards
• Insurance agencies – 160 boards.

Most of the boards were made up of multiple pins. When you click on a board, the agency name shows up at the top with a descriptive profile, which in most cases talks about the agency.

Drilling down to individual pins on a board, you find that people can share the pin via Twitter, Facebook or get the embed code to insert it in a website, send it via email or directly to another Pinterest member. They can “like” it or “pin it” to one of their own boards. And that's how it can go viral.

Getting back to the “half life” comment: With Pinterest's search ability and the fact that it's always on the board, it never really disappears. People will spend much more time looking at a board on Pinterest than they will on a Facebook page.

As Koetsier said when comparing social media, “The key difference is that while Pinterest is a social network, it's also an ideas-and-inspiration website, whereas Twitter and Facebook are social networks with a massive emphasis on immediacy.”

Because of the long-tail view of pins, it could be said that between the ease of use (clicking a button on your browser bar to pin something) and the bigger picture boards convey, the time you spend on Pinterest could give you greater return in the long run than Twitter or Facebook.

Check out what your colleagues are doing on Pinterest and let me know when you throw your agency hat into the ring. I'll be sure to re-pin you.