Businesses should include experimentation with Pinterest in their social media strategy, industry expert Margaret Donnelly has explained.

Donnelly, marketing manager at Meltwater Buzz, believes companies should adopt Pinterest in order to engage and entice browsers to their website. They can do this by embedding the 'pin it' code on their website, enabling images to be immediately shared.  

Likened to "a visual version of Twitter" by ITProPortal, the emerging online phenomenon allows users to 'pin' photos of products they like to a virtual board, which is shared among other users.

It could therefore provide a multitude of marketing opportunities for those operating ecommerce businesses - perhaps via a Magento hosting platform - as Donnelly suggested they could link the 'pin' button to products offered on an ecommerce site.

Already the site has received 12 million viewers in the US alone, making it the fastest standalone website to hit the million mark "in history". In the UK, the site had almost two million visits in January.

She believes it could be the perfect channel through which to launch new products, perhaps offering "sneak peaks" to Pinterest connections. Social 'pin this' incentives and competitions may also prove lucrative in terms of attracting and converting users into sales.

"Pinterest is fast becoming an essential element to a brand's social media activity," Donnelly concluded on Fourth Source.