HYDERABAD: Growing up does not mean letting go of activities one enjoyed as a child. For those, who take pride in collating and compiling scrapbooks, Pinterest brings alive the hobby, where you can share the posts (rather, ‘pins’ in this case) and view the work of others who share your interests.Like a pin-board, users can share pictures, video or a product and discussions, sorted out on the basis of themes and broad interests.With the updated Pinterest app for iPhone, the photo-sharing website is the flavour of the season for social media enthusiasts as well as business houses and entertainment industry.While Indians discover the three year-old website in its new avatar launched earlier this month, Pinterest recently got an Indian connection.The web app Pinpuff launched by an Indian brother-sister duo has got the world talking. The application measures the reach and influence of the user’s pins and the traffic it generates. In short, Pinpuff is to Pinterest, what Klout is to other social media sites. “We are not competing with Klout at all.They give a composite number of your total influence on social media and we are very specific. Additionally, we are in talks with numerous e-commerce sites to use our API that will help them recommend better targeted products to Pinterest users,” says 23 year-old Gaurav Sharma, one of the founders of Pinpuff.The NIT-Warangal graduate started the venture with his sister Ammrita Sharma close to four months back. Pinpuff was thrown open to public exactly 30 days back and has created enough buzz to rope in 18,000 users across 95 countries, including brands and designers on its rolls.Pinpuff helps track the exposure of your pins including the traffic and sales it generates, attracting a large number of business collaborators.“Our business model is fairly simple - we help brands to connect with ‘pinfluencers’ (highly followed on Pinterest on a specific theme) or activate pinfluencers to do certain tasks on Pinterest. For example, a Canadian TV channel is running a campaign with us where they want 50 ladies who are influential about home-decor to pin about that TV show and win gift-coupons and a chance to feature in the show,” says Gaurav.Pinpuff will carry out a similar campaign for a leading automobile brand for the New York International Auto Show starting April 4.With Pinterest users from the US and the UK making up for half the Pinpuff enthusiasts, Indian business houses are yet to catch up with the phenomenon.“Pinterest is not as big as other social networking sites in India but still manages to generate 3.5% of Pinterest’s total page views, which in itself is a big number.Two things that make Pinterest so important for any brand’s digital marketing plans are high digital engagement levels and the ability of pinterest to send truck loads of referral traffic.As Pinterest grows in India, importance of a tool like Pinpuff will pick up too,” hopes Gaurav. For those already hooked to Pinterest on mobile, Pinpuff plans to launch its mobile apps soon. Wherever you go, your online clout counts
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