There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the new social media darling Pinterest. The online pinboard is growing quickly and according to a new report from Compete, Pinterest is also driving a lot of traffic to other social networks. People are sharing images and videos on Pinterest which in turn drive traffic to sites like Facebook. According to the State of Social Media report from Compete, Pinterest delivered 1.7 million visits to Facebook in November 2011, an increase by 62%. As a comparison, that is almost double the amount of referrals from an established site like Yellowpages.com.

In this social ecosystem, social networks in turn drive traffic back to Pinterest. It is quite interesting to see that Facebook is already driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram (0.16% share vs 0.06%). And this was before it was announced in January that Pinterest was among the sites that could start auto-update to the Facebook timeline, which possibly means that more images are now shared on Facebook than in November.

Twitter on the other hand is still driving more referrals to Instagram than to Pinterest.

The difference between how Facebook and Twitter drive referrals to Pinterest and Instagram is interesting. I don’t have an explanation to why this is, but one theory could be that the demographics of Pinterest users better match Facebook users while Instagram users are more like Twitter users. Says TechCrunch:

“Unlike most web startups, Pinterest’s core user base is not the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the United States. While the Pacific and North East regions contained the most Pinterest users in May, now its strongholds are in the East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi.”

According to TechCrunch, a large portion of Pinterest users in the US are 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which may explain why some of the more popular categories on Pinterest are food, pets, hair & beauty and travel.

Another explanation can of course be that Instagram mainly is an app and that its web presence is not very good. When you click on an Instagram photo there’s hardly no way to get that user to keep on browsing on the site. You can’t even click on my name and explore more of my photos, so visits to www.instagr.am is not at all encouraged. On Twitter, Instagram photos are viewable within the site and in for example TweetDeck (but I don’t know if that counts as a “visit”).

Also, a tiny but important detail. When you tweet a photo from Pinterest, it doesn’t include the caption in the tweet, which might reduce the willingness to push the send button. Fix that, and I am sure more people will share pinned images on Twitter.

• Instagram now growing faster than Flickr
• How to create a Twitter background image from your Instagram photos
• Instagram now has 9 million users
• Instagram may reach 1 billion photos in April
• Instagram now has 10 million users

What type of journalism could be more up to date than live broadcast or real time reporting? The UK paper the Telegraph may have come up with a solution – publishing articles from the future. Today, Feb 5, 2012, the Telegraph has published an article from March 4, 2012. I knew the Brits were smart, but to see one month into the future was even more than I expected.

Of course, there could be another explanation. That the Education Editor dropped out of math in school…

• Spotify founder named “Elk” by Reuters
• Facebook is driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram
• Edelman Trust Barometer 2012 says trust in social media is up
• How to create a Twitter background image from your Instagram photos
• Socialbakers Facebook report for Sweden – Jan 2012

Swedish names might be a challenge for foreign journalists, but to misspell the last name of Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek is quite an achievement. In a list of the most social CEO’s, Reuters calls him Daniel Elk. What a moostake…

• Reuters launches software generated podcasts
• Benkow admits – Gates interview was fake
• Six Swedish companies among the Top 100 Global Innovators
• The Telegraph can see into the future
• Nissan in new Australian social media backlash

Just like in the last report (Nov 2011) from Socialbakers, the Body Shop is the brand page in Sweden with the highest level of engagement. OKQ8 is the page with the highes response rate, followed by two Telia pages. In fact, half of the top 10 pages in regards to response rate, are telecom operators.

Vakna! med the Voice is the media page with most fans.

In case you are missing a page that would qualify in the top 10 lists above, please suggest it here.

• Socialbakers Facebook report for Sweden – Nov 2011
• 2.5 million LinkedIn members in the Nordic countries
• The brands on Facebook that most people are talking about
• Your Facebook page is a litmus test of your brand’s health
• Zlatan Ibrahimovic is not on Facebook, but his fans are