Do you have a Pinterest account? The better question may be: How many times have you heard this question in the past few weeks? Pinterest has become the fastest growing standalone site in history with 11.7 million unique visitors recorded in January. It now drives more traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube combined. Pretty impressive, right?

So, just what is Pinterest? The company calls it a virtual pinboard. Well, OK, but that doesn’t really spell it out.

I explain it to people this way: Remember your junior high days when you would cut out pictures you loved from magazines and pin them on cork boards or the walls of your bedroom? Pinterest is kind of like that. Only, it’s an online pinboard that lets you pin images you love that you find online. It also keeps links attached to the images you find so you can easily refer back to the site you found them on. You can also organize your pins into different categories by having a pinboard for various topics. Many users usually have a recipe pinboard, a home decor pinboard, a favorite product pinboard, and so on.

Perhaps the most interesting recent development of Pinterest is the inclusion of brands and companies within the social media platform. Once reports of the high traffic numbers started to surface, it was a no-brainer that businesses would need to make themselves visible to their potential customers. But how does a business fit into this platform that most people are using for dinner and home decorating inspiration?

With a little creativity.

Businesses, companies and brands have revamped their social media approach to fit into this image-heavy social media platform. In doing so, we’ve seen some really great ways to engage and foster a new online community. From promoting a certain lifestyle to calling followers to pin photos of themselves holding various products, there are a lot of very cool ways you can join the pinterverse.

Some of our favorite brand pinboards are:

– Real Simple
– HGTV
– West Elm
– Chobani
– Mashable

Are you on Pinterest? Check out our pinboards at http://pinterest.com/worldcosocial/.