Pinterest rise to greatness happened fast. In less than a year the social networking site broke from almost complete anonymity into the hottest thing the web can offer. Now, according to a new report, it looks like the virtual pinboard managed to climb above some of the major social networks.

The new stats are coming from the 2012 Digital Marketer report of Experian, where it is indicated that Pinterest is now the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter while it is ranking before LinkedIn and Google+, with almost 21.5 million total visits during the week ending on January 28th.

I have to say that these data don’t surprise me. I already suspected and hinted this was the case a few weeks ago, although I suggested that Pinterest surpassed Google+ but not LinkedIn. Experian report revealing that both of those social networks can now find Pinterest above them.

The report also indicating that Pinterest’s demographics may also balancing up- While on my first review about Pinterest in November 2011, 70% of the site’s users were female and other reports even suggested higher percentages, these fresh data suggests that now it is down to 60% female users.

In any case, the report’s traffic data are a bit outdated (relevant for the end of January) and missing the traffic stats of all other social networks. So, I dug up the most recent Experian top social media websites weekly statistics from its data center (for the week ending on March 31st):

We can see from the table that Pinterest remained the third most popular traditional social network (excluding YouTube and Yahoo Answers) with slightly more than 23 million total visits that week. This is nearly 20% more visits than LinkedIn’s and 62% more visits than Google+! Even if Experian numbers aren’t accurate, these kind of gaps are pretty decisive…

The recent Pinterest numbers also confirms that the site’s growth has indeed slow down as I reported few days ago- The site’s growth from the last week of January to the last week of March is “only” 7% and not the numbers we got used to see from Pinterest in the last 12 months. Nonetheless, Pinterest is still ahead of LinkedIn and certainly far ahead of Google+.

What I mostly like about the fact that Pinterest is the third most visited social network is that even if there are much bigger players with much bigger marketing and PR budgets where the industry is highly competitive, eventually if your product is good enough you can find yourself ranking above them.