Pinterest has gotten very popular for a wide variety of businesses and in theory, it’s a great way to promote your business. People will spread the word for you if you have a product or item that gets people’s attention. Unfortunately it might just be too easy. Spammers have found a new way to get to your friends and customers.

Michelle Espinoza a jewellery maker reported to Bloomberg that some of the images posted of her work redirected people to pornography and other spam sites.

Needless to say, that could cost you big if you use social media sites such as Pinterest to promote your business. From the article:

“Social spam can be a lot more effective than e-mail spam,” said Mark Risher, chief executive officer of anti-spam software provider Impermium in Palo Alto, California. “We see a lot of it, and we see it increasing. The bad guys are taking to this with great abandon.”

Spammers create as many as 40 percent of the accounts on social-media sites, Risher said. About 8 percent of messages sent via social pages are spam, approximately twice the volume six months ago, he said.

Read the full article here on Bloomberg. I would suggest you check your account regularly to see where your links are going but unfortunately after you stuff has been shared on other people’s boards, you might loose control of it.

Where Pinterest falls very short is how they police the site. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have invested heavily in reducing spam and check items posted for content. Pinterest is relying on users to report a pin they feel is suspicious. That doesn’t work very well, I’ve reported items a couple of times and never heard a reply back. These items exist on the site today, months after reporting them on more than one occasion. Pinterest appears to be somewhat amateurish in how the site is run. Maybe it’s a case of being understaffed or underfunded. Issues like photo sharing rules that we reported on earlier seem to be developed on the fly and not well thought out.

Be careful if you have a board there to promote your business and check your boards regularly or maybe better, delete them before you get caught up sending ‘member’ enlargement pills to your customers who wanted to see your hand made afghans.

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