Pinterest Climbing the Social Media Ranks

NEW YORK -- Now batting in the No. 3 position, behind Facebook and Twitter, is new kid on the social media block, Pinterest.

The social media site, which lets users "pin" photos and information from the Internet onto virtual boards, ranks behind only Facebook and Twitter in terms of total visitors, according to an Experian Marketing Services analysis, titled "The 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report."

The ranking is based on the total number of U.S. visitors during March and does not include mobile traffic, Experian spokeswoman Jennifer Marshall told CNN.

Last month, Facebook had more than seven billion total visitors, while Twitter had 182 million and Pinterest had 104 million total visits from people in the United States, according to data sent to CNN by Experian. Those numbers led to Pinterest pulling ahead of LinkedIn, Google+, MySpace and Tumblr.

"The site has really just rocketed," said Matt Tatham, another spokesman for Experian. "It's just been tremendous since [Pinterest] took off around October and then in the last few months. With Pinterest, it's kind of a new take on an old thing. Social networking is great. Pinterest is great. The way people are sharing on Pinterest is new."

However, Tatham added that since the numbers do not include mobile sites, Twitter, which sees much of its traffic from smartphones and tablets, may have taken a hit in this ranking, he told the news outlet.

Pinterest's traffic jumped 50 percent between January and February of this year. The report calls the site "the hottest social media start-up since Facebook and YouTube."

Pinterest's co-founder Ben Silbermann announced last month that an iPad application and new pinboards are in the works. The boards -- where people pin photos of products they'd like to buy and other interesting bits of info they find while trolling the Internet -- are key to Pinterest's success, Silbermann said at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March.

The Experian report also found that Pinterest is proving popular with females -- about 60 percent of the users are women -- and among people living in the middle of the country. Pinterest is most popular relative to other social networks in Missouri, Utah, Alabama, Oklahoma and Kansas, the report showed.