As if you didn't need any more reasons to start using Pinterest for your business: the latest news on the Pinterest front is that the new social media star has surpassed Twitter in generation of referral traffic, as reported by TechCrunch. This is an incredibly huge piece of news, mainly because Twitter has long been the giant among social networking sites in sharing links and generating huge referral traffic back to original sites. Well, not anymore – Pinterest is taking the crown from Twitter, and placing it on its own image-laden head.

How? What? Why? I understand the stunned wonder many SEO marketers out there may be feeling. There are actually two distinct reasons to explain why Pinterest is beating out Twitter on driving referral traffic. One reason is the medium, or platform, that defines the social media site; and the other is its functionality, or the way it was simply designed to work. Both of these reasons, in fact, are really qualities that are inherent to Pinterest.

There is one word that can perfectly sum up the first reason: images. Ours is a society that is increasingly driven towards images, whether moving or still. All of our technologies –and their accompanying software and applications – continually work towards addressing that by creating products that focus on creating, editing, and sharing images. Pinterest is the ultimate satisfaction of many people's need to look at and share images, and it is simply because of this that more and more people are signing up for and engaging with the service.

The second reason cannot be summed up in a single word, but it can be said that Pinterest in its design seems intrinsically conducive to generating referral traffic to other sites. That is because Pinterest's entire function is to provide a board on which people can post images from the other websites they have visited. Anyone who sees that image on someone's board, and clicks on it, immediately gets redirected to the original site.

The likelihood of someone clicking on that link is significantly higher than on Twitter because, as I've already stated, the image is what draws people in. An image evokes a lot more interest in a viewer than a shortened link.

The numbers speak for themselves; it only makes sense to start incorporating Pinterest into a business's SEO marketing strategy as soon as possible.