Just in case you haven’t heard about one of the hottest social services to emerge in 2011, Pinterest describes itself as a ‘virtual pinboard’. It allows users to collect, organise, and share things they like from around the web on their pinboards (collections). As with other social services you can follow other users, seeing the things that they share, and their pinboards.

Pinterest has been experiencing explosive growth in recent months, hitting more than 7 million unique visitors in December. This audience has attracted the attention of businesses, with several jumping in and making use of the platform.

Pinterest has a strict no advertising policy. Before diving in you need to think carefully about what kind of interesting, eye-catching imagery you can come up with. In order to get great value out of the network, you need to give some value.

While it is early days, there are rumours that some businesses are getting great results from their investment. If you have fantastic images of your great looking products being used then it would seem like Pinterest could be a great place for you to consider creating a presence.

Here are a few examples of businesses making use of Pinterest:

Etsy

Etsy and Pinterest seem like the perfect match. Etsy is using Pinterest to organise interesting, beautiful, and well crafted handmade items from their sellers into pinboards like Home Sweet Home, Fashion, and Holiday Decorating Inspiration.

Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market uses Pinterest to showcase their products in use. Beautiful shots of delicious looking food that makes you want to run down to your local Whole Foods and buy, buy, buy.

Wedding Republic

Wedding pinboards have been a huge contributor to Pinterest’s growth. It seems that it is quickly becoming the defacto standard for young women (and some guys too I guess) planning their big days. Wedding Republic (which is an online wedding registry service) has recognised this, and is using Pinterest to raise awareness by helping to provide fuel for the voracious wedding planning pinners.

HomeAway.com

HomeAway.com shares images from their catalogue of more than 600,000 holiday houses that are available for rent.

We also noticed that one of our customers, Hei Moose (who we profiled earlier this week) has already jumped in and started pinning. If anyone else is pinning too let us know in the comments below. We’d love to know if you are finding it useful.

Currently Pinterest is in invite only beta, but you can request an invitation on the site. We also have a few invitations that we can give out to our customers. If you are interested in checking it out, leave a comment below and we will get an invite out to you ASAP.