Pinterest continues to grow in popularity, having gone from 100 Million monthly users in September 2015 to 150 million today. Pinterest is also losing its status as a platform that is primarily for women, with men now making up 40% of all users, which is a 70% increase over last year. Even more amazing is that over 50% of all millennials in the US are now on Pinterest!

“As a Pinner once said to me, “Pinterest is for yourself, not your selfies”—I love that,” said Ben Silbermann, CEO & Co-Founder of Pinterest. “Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.”

He added, “Personally I can’t wait to see what new ideas all these people bring to Pinterest, and find out what happens when they give those ideas a try. Thank you all so much for being here…each and every one hundred and fifty million of you!”

Pinterest is a Huge Business Marketing Opportunity

The company also noted that Pinterest now provides 10 billion recommendations daily, more than 150 million visual searches happen monthly, and there are more than 1 million businesses on the service with “tens of thousands” actively advertising.

They say that they now have over 75 billion pins and an amazing 75% of them were posted by businesses.

“Growing the number of people on Pinterest by 50% over the last year is pretty impressive especially when you consider that Pinterest is more a personal tool than a social one,” said Jon Kaplan, Head of Global Sales for Pinterest. “People don’t invite all their friends to join, and they don’t log in to see what their friends are doing (there are lots of other great places out there for that!). Instead, they come to Pinterest to discover and do the things they love, and learn a little bit more about themselves in the process.”

Pinterest is now able to offer marketers precise information what products people are searching for the most and who those people are and they are willing to let marketers link into that data.

“With so many people around the world saving and searching for ideas on Pinterest, we now know more about what’s trending—and with which audiences—than anyone else,” says Kaplan. “As a business, this means you have millions of new opportunities to connect your ideas and products to the people who are most interested in giving them a try.”

Marketing with Pinterest

Pinterest is a unique marketing opportunity for both large and small businesses. Pinterest can be used as a traffic driver like many other search and social platforms, but Pinterest can also uniquely be used to inspire and engage audiences with your brand.

Babylist, a unique baby registry service that allows you to put anything on your registry from ANY store, used Pinterest to rapidly grow brand awareness and engagement with their exact targeted audience. To reach the 43 million people on Pinterest preparing for a baby, BabyList optimized their website for Pinterest and included Pin-worthy content in every blog post from the start, according to the Pinterest ad team.

“We were surprised at just how many new registries Pinterest drove for us,” said Brittany Murlas, former CMO of Babylist. “I would describe our overall success on Pinterest in two words: Explosive growth.”

According to Pinterest, within the first 5 months of using Promoted Pins, they saw a 70% increase in account signups and a 40% increase in revenue and heir content has been saved by more than 50,000 people to baby-specific boards.

What’s Next for Pinterest?

According to Kaplan, Pinterest is evolving into a “truly worldwide (platform), with more men, more ideas and more sophisticated technologies to help get the right ideas to the right people.