Lauren Williamson | @Laurenew90

The content sharing and amplification platform Shareaholic released its quarterly social media traffic report, which indicates that Facebook drives the most traffic to websites with Pinterest being its strongest contender. Pinterest is now the second-largest social traffic referrer, driving 5.52 percent of total visits. That's a 50.07 percent growth since last year, blazing past Twitter, Reddit and StumbleUpon. But what’s the cause of this recent success for Pinterest? The answer could be Promoted Pins.

Pinterest originally launched Promoted Pins with only a small group of advertisers, but it has been gradually adding new businesses. Once Pinterest fully releases ads, the impact will be huge for social media marketers. The visual media of Pinterest would allow brands to showcase their products in a natural way. Pinterest’s impact on e-commerce is already outperforming other social media sites, and it accounts for 23 percent of global social-mediated e-commerce sales.

With the social media world behind Pinterest, brands are looking to set up their own Promoted Pins when they have access to them. The process is similar to setting up advertisements on Facebook. When users select a pin they want to promote, they specify keywords, geographical locations, genders and languages they want to advertise to. Pinterest uses a cost-per-click model, which means advertisers only get charged when users click to visit their website. Throughout the campaign, advertisers can keep up with detailed analytics to see how the Promoted Pin is performing.

Pinterest hasn’t released information or a specific date when this feature will be available to everyone. Right now, the site is focusing on providing a great experience for advertisers and regular pinners. But every day, more and more brands are flocking to Pinterest’s image-driven environment.