You have shared links before. Everyone has. Sharing links is easy. Just think about putting a URL into your status in Facebook, and then it creates that neat little link for you, without the unsightly URL text in there. That is sharing links.

But there is a new way. Sharing links just got easier. The newest wave of social media can be found on social bookmark sites. Social bookmarking is the term for just sharing links with your followers. No inappropriate pictures of your weekend, no ignorant status updates, no people being mean. Social bookmarking takes advantage of all the good that there is in social media, without providing an outlet for the bad.

There are several examples of social bookmarking out there right now, some that you may have actually been using without your even knowing it. Twitter, actually, can be considered social bookmarking. As can Reddit, and Pocket, and the progenitor of the popularity of social bookmarking, Pinterest.

As Pinterest is certainly one of the most popular, perhaps a little more about it is in order. Pinterest is not actually all that old, only having been launched in March of 2010. Only 20% of the users on Pinterest are male, which explains why almost all of the content on there is pictures of crafts, wedding dresses, and recipes. There is actually a male dominated take on the site known as Mantersting, which is probably 100% male.

Pinterest is the third most popular social media website on the internet today. While people visiting YouTube spend about 42 minutes there a day, Facebook sees 58 minutes a day, and Twitter sees 36 minutes a day, Pinterest gets an average of 14 minutes per visit. With multiple visits a day, per person, it would only take four visits to hit the Facebook mark. Altogether, the average Pinner spends over 98 minutes on the site a month.

It currently has over 70 million users and a swiftly growing 20 million monthly active users. When it comes to accessing social media on the iPad in terms of sharing content, Pinterest wins with 48.2% of the activity. Nearly 80% of the pins made to that site are actually just repins, making it one of the largest sharing and collaborative communities on the internet.

Using the social bookmarking tools that Pinterest has to offer, anyone can pin whatever they want, from whatever site they are on, with the simple click of a button. So if you want in on the latest social media craze, that is easy to pick up, and difficult toput down, social bookmarking is clearly the place to get started.