Colleges are excited enough about the potential of Pinterest — an image-based social media site that has grown with astonishing speed — to keep their institutional brand on the minds of prospective students and alumni that many have scrambled to establish a “presence” there, even as the value of the site as a marketing tool remains hazy. Others have hung back, leery of investing too heavily in trendy platforms before their utility can be properly pinned down.

Pinterest, a "virtual pinboard” where users can create profiles by accruing illustration-based "pins” that represent their interests and affiliations, is nowhere near as large as other social media sites that college communications staffers have been wrangling for the better part of a decade. But its rate of growth has been difficult to ignore. Pinterest has fewer than half a million users last May; by January it had more than 11.7 million, according to an analysis by the tech consulting firm Modea. That makes Pinterest one of the fastest-growing websites ever.

While the site nevertheless remains orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook and Twitter, which colleges currently rate as the top two social sites for accomplishing their “messaging” goals, Pinterest’s essential focus on visual storytelling might give it a trump card over its largely text-focused forebears, says Aaron Jaco, a digital media specialist in the marketing office at Drake...