If you haven’t already started your holiday marketing or at least started planning it, you better get in gear, because it’s that time. Social media played a less significant role in holiday ecommerce last year than other channels like search and email, but things are evolving on the social commerce front, and technically, Pinterest is more about search than social anyway.

Have you begun planning your holiday marketing attack yet? Let us know in the comments.

Pinterest has been trying to recruit advertisers and get them to fork over part of their search budgets because the service is ultimately more about finding things than conversing with friends, even though Pinterest is widely considered a social media service.

Last week, Pinterest revealed that it has over 100 million monthly active users and that the number of pinners doubled in the past 18 months. The number of searches increased 18% year over year.

Usage is likely about to explode further given that the company just opened up its API to all developers enabling them to build countless new apps and integrations that utilize pins, boards, and Pinterest user profiles.

“Earlier this year, we launched the Pinterest Developers Platform, a suite of endpoints for building apps and integrations that bring Pins to life and help people do more with their Pins,” a spokesperson for Pinterest tells us. “By opening the platform to further development and creativity, people will have more ways to take action with their Pins.”

So far, developers have submitted over 5,000 ideas for apps and integrations, the company says. These include recipe recommendation apps, travel planning apps, gift registry integrations, publisher integrations, etc.

Pinterest released some new stats surrounding how people use the service in relation to the holidays this week. According to the company, even though it’s not even October yet, millions of people have already started pinning content related to the winter holidays.

“With 170 million holiday decor Pins (and 3 million ugly sweater Pins), Pinterest is the one-stop shop for holiday ideas big and small—and these numbers just keep growing,” says Pinterest’s Edwin Wong. “From 2013 to 2014, the number of holiday Pins grew by 50%.”

“Don’t forget: Holidays on Pinterest aren’t just about tinsel and Santa hats, they’re also about shopping,” he adds. “It’s no secret that Pinners love to buy. 47% of Pinners start shopping for the holidays before Thanksgiving, according to Civic Science(That number’s only 39% for shoppers in general!).”

Pinterest tells businesses to get your holidays off to a good start by: visiting your audience analytics to see what kinds of things your audience likes; creating seasonal content that “maps” to your audience’s interests; adding text overlay and descriptions to make pins more click-worthy, and of course using Promoted Pins.

Since Pinterest released the above infographic and holiday stats, it has opened up its API to developers opening the floodgates for developers to build apps and integrations utilizing Pinterest, which should help boost numbers even more.

The company’s CEO has also been speaking about how low the opt-out rate is for Promoted Pins. Something to think about.

Do you intend to incorporate Pinterest into your marketing mix for the holidays? Let us know in the comments.

Images via Pinterest