Pinterest (Photo credit: stevegarfield)

Pinterest: if you’re not already aware of it, you should be. The hottest social network out there right now, Pinterest allows users to share photos and interact with others on virtual “pinboards,” ideal for sharing images of food, places, clothes, design and anything else with visual appeal.  Here are some eye-opening Pinterest facts that might make you consider utilizing its increasingly large user base in your marketing plan.

1. From December 2011 to January 2012, unique visitors to Pinterest increased by a whopping 155%. (Compete)
2. Pinterest engages and retains users at least two times as efficiently as Twitter did at a similar point in its history. (RJ Metrics)
3. Pinterest gets more monthly usage per user than Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn combined. (AllTwitter)
4. It accounts for 3.6 percent of all referral traffic, nearly as much as Twitter (3.61 percent). (PR Daily)
5. Ninety-seven percent of Pinterest users are female. (AppData)
6. Women ages 25 to 34 make up the largest demographic of Pinterest users. (Ignite)
7. For the week ending with Feb. 18, Pinterest had the fifth highest share of social media visitors at 0.98 percent, ahead of LinkedIn (0.79%) and Google+ (0.45%). (Hitwise)
8. In the United States, top shared topics include crafts and gifts, leisure, interior design and fashion. (Ragan.com)
9. Real Simple, a magazine affiliated with Time Inc., reports that its website gets more traffic from Pinterest than it does from Facebook.
10. Hubspot reports Pinterest drove nearly 200 more referrals to its website than Google+ did during February 2012.
11. A disproportionately high number of Pinterest users come from the “east south central” region of the United States (states like Kentucky and Mississippi) or the “west north central” region (states like Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas). (Business2Community)
12. With over 11 million unique monthly visitors (and counting), Pinterest became the fastest standalone website to eclipse the 10 million per month mark ever. (PR Daily)