In the past month, I have read quite a few articles on how journalists and publications are using Pinterest to drive traffic to their site and engage their audience with the 6-month-old photocentric tool. When I first heard about Pinterest, I thought, Great, another social media time suck to add to my repertoire. Instead of thinking out of the box on how to use it as an engaging tool, I figured it was just an online picture book (which it is, though).

Media Bistro published a story last week on the top five news organizations to follow on Pinterest. It’s a great story on how hard news outlets are using pinboards to show and tell stories. Magazines such as Time and Life have boards dedicated to vintage magazine covers so you can go back in time. Journalists are using Pinterst as well, developing their story ideas with images.

With Breathe, we are using Pinterest to showcase not only our cover images, but all of our blog content as well. We want to curate our Pinterest content around our own original material (as opposed to repinning images). I have found that Pinterest is a great tool for lifestyle magazines more so than hard news outlets (although hard news outlets are using Pintesest in unique ways — e.g. Newsweek’s Rick Santorum’s sweater vests). All of my favorite lifestyle magazines are on Pinterest and their images stream through my feed throughout the day, inspiring me.

I started pinning Breathe’s blog posts today (follow at ReadBreathe). I just uploaded a blog post’s URL and then selected what image I wanted to display and it automatically linked the image to our website. With one click to a photo of a recipe, DIY project or fashion item, you are taken directly to Breathe’s blog post. Wow! I wish I would’ve realized what an ideal way this is to drive traffic to a website. Fo’ real. It’s like Twitter, but photodriven. Good thing we have an awesome art team who not only designed our website, but is amping up our image content on the site. This means we can go far on Pinterest.

At Breathe, we organized our boards by our website’s categories: style, books, DIY, gardening, fitness, food, travel and inspirational essays. We are in the process now of adding to Pinterest. We hope you start following our boards!

Happy pinning! Check out some of our boards.

Our Breathe Magazine covers board.

Our Food board, which features delicious recipes.

Our Fitness board, which features gear reviews and workouts.

Our Books board, which features our reviews and giveaways.

I, too, have a Pinterest account, so follow me as well!