This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on 12/12/2011.

With news this week that Facebook is beginning to roll out its new Timeline feature, it reminds us that so much of what’s captured on the world’s most popular social networking site are our fondest memories. And if you look at your newsfeed in any given day it will often reflect the present – what’s happening in the world around you today. But there is not typically a lot of discussion about more aspirational topics, and what people are hoping for in the future.

A new social networking phenomenon appears to be taking off that just might fill this need. Online pinboard sites, led by Pinterest, represent your wants, desires and the future memories you wish to create. If this trend has not yet appeared on your radar, online pinboards are basically shareable scrapbooks that you create using online content you find around the web. If you see an image that you want to “pin” to your “board” you can simply snag it via a plugin and add it to your online profile. Everyone that follows you can view your pinboards, comment on them, and add to them if they have permission.

I heard about this emerging trend from a colleague, who used Pinterest as a central component of her wedding planning. She is able to create specialized pinboards for everything from the wedding dress to the invitations to potential honeymoon destinations. Her collective team of de facto wedding planners can all work in unison to vote up and down on every detail in order to deliver the perfect wedding experience. Although it would seem like Facebook and Twitter have most of the ground covered from a social networking perspective, there is always room for an innovator to tap into the existing cultural zeitgeist. According to recent comScore data, it’s clear there is considerable and growing appetite for this kind of social engagement.

Pinterest: The New Player in Town

Pinterest has emerged as the main player in the online pinboard space, skyrocketing to nearly 5 Million U.S. unique visitors in November 2011 after first appearing on our reporting radar just six months earlier.

From what I can gather, the growth for this site has been completely organic, coming from the sharing of pinboards and personal invitations going out from existing members. Pinterest did not respond to my invitation request in time for this column and I had to have my colleague Kate invite me before I could get into the site and explore what it was all about.

“Pinterest” as a brand name also appears to be entering the general lexicon in a similar fashion to words like “Twitter” in 2008-09, as evidenced by the number of searches on this new branded term. Considering that the word did not exist in 2010 but in October 2011 nearly 900,000 has searched for the term “Pinterest” more than 2.4 million times, it’s clear that awareness of this brand is accelerating. Search data like this can often be a leading indicator to investors regarding the viral growth of a company, especially in the absence of more concrete data such as sales.

Who is Pinterested?

Living in New York City, it is easy to think that every new trend starts here on the Coast (geographic arrogance to the max!), but online pinboarding appears to have tapped into a region that normally comes up later in the internet adoption cycle: The Midwest.

When analyzing Pinterest’s visitor base, we see that visitors from the Midwest regions are up to 102% more likely to visit Pinterest.com than the average U.S. Internet user. This is in stark contrast to East/West coast regional visitors, who are 63% less likely to visit the site. This difference is even more pronounced when analyzing “Pinterest” searchers, with Midwesterners up to 185% more likely to search for the term as opposed to the Coasters, lead by New England, which is 83% less likely than average.

My anecdotal research (i.e. me speaking with my female colleagues in Chicago who introduced me to the site) suggests that Online Pinboarding mirrors scrapbooking as an activity, which is apparently huge in that area of the country. This is further backed up by my discussions with my East/West coast colleagues who all seem to agree; they are just not scrap-bookers at heart. The real growth to this point has come from the scrapbook-heavy Midwest, and it is only recently that the too-cool-for-school Coasters have begun to catch on. With the coasts still waiting to be conquered, now might be a good time for Pinterest to begin thinking about some regionally targeted paid search advertising before one of their competitors swoops in and capitalizes.

Pintresting Trends

Pinterest is on its way up, and online pinboarding looks like it just may represent the next wave of Social Networking. The intuitive functionality related to pinning images from around the internet to your board, combined with an existing Midwestern proclivity for scrapbooking, have allowed for huge growth in a very short period of time. Just remember that you can’t look at your site metrics in a vacuum. Visitor trends relate to search trends and can all be used in conjunction to better understand both your existing and future users.

comScore recently released our global social networking report, “It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows about Social Networking and Where it’s Headed,” which we certainly encourage you to download if you haven’t already. And while the report offers a comprehensive global view of what’s happening in social media, I thought it might also be interesting to drill down into the latest snapshot of the U.S. social networking market.

In light of recent IPO activity in this market, and rumors of more to come in 2012, it is worth understanding why the U.S. market is stronger than it has ever been before and how it’s managing to accommodate the emergence of several upstarts.

The data shown here for the leading social networking sites focuses on visitation to the primary web pages for the selected sites via home and work computers, and excludes any activity from mobile phones & tablets. While these mobile channels contribute to incremental audience and engagement – in some cases, significantly so – it is important to recognize that this data looks at each site through a similarly defined universe of computer-based web usage. Many of the social networking sites covered are household names by now, while others have gained prominence in the past year.

Facebook is still the undisputed leader the U.S. social networking market with 166 million unique visitors in November. The average user spent 6.6 hours per person engaged on the site during the month, an increase of 37% in the past year. These outsized audience and engagement numbers should not be a surprise to anyone at this point. Meanwhile, Twitter.com and Linkedin.com have been jockeying over the past several months for the #2 spot in audience size. In November, Twitter eked out the second position with 35.4 million unique visitors, just slightly ahead of Linkedin with 35 million. Myspace currently owns the #4 position with 25 million visitors, but it has seen a steady decline in audience over the past two years.

Outside of these established players, there are three upstarts worth mentioning. One of the most consistent growth stories over the past year has been Tumblr.com, which now boasts 15.9 million U.S. visitors – an increase of 131% since November 2010, with the majority of that surge happening since April 2011. What is significant about Tumblr is not just its growing audience but how highly engaged its users are, with the average one spending 2.4 hours on the site per month. Its engagement numbers are now second only to Facebook.

Just behind Tumblr is Google Plus, which has received a great deal of attention this year, with 15.2 million U.S. visitors in November. While Google Plus nearly matches Tumblr from an audience standpoint in the U.S., it does not yet attract similar levels of user engagement on its primary web pages. Importantly, these figures account for activity on plus.google.com and do not include engagement with the Google Plus toolbar or other distributed content throughout the Google network of sites. Given Google’s strategy of integrating Google Plus throughout its network, including Google Search and YouTube, it will be interesting to see if increased exposure to this extended social functionality exerts any gravitational pull towards the primary Google Plus experience.

One final social network that deserves some attention is online pinboard Pinterest.com. The site, which first came onto the comScore radar in May 2011 with 418,000 unique visitors, has surged over the past six months to nearly 4.9 million visitors. Also significant is that, like Tumblr, Pinterest is exceptionally sticky and keeps it users engaged for long periods of time. In November, the average visitor spent nearly an hour and a half on the site over the course of the month and more than 15 minutes per visit, ranking it third on consumer engagement.

The U.S. social networking market has never been stronger, and the current dynamics suggest that while Facebook clearly remains the leader, there is room for some other players in the market to emerge and become successful in their own rights. We’ll be keeping an eye on how their audiences and engagement continue to grow as we head into 2012.