A while ago, I already wrote a little beginner's guide to using Pinterest and told you about how to get started with handlettering while using Pinterest as a learning tool.
Since then, I have been constantly filling my boards with pretty images and many sources of inspiration, I've been guest pinner on awesome company accounts and I've done several cooperations for brands which involved Pinterest. My Pinterest profile's followership has grown ever since to more than 55.000 followers, hooray! :) Next to Instagram, it's my fave app and I use it nearly on a daily basis.
Over the last couple of months and years, other friends or bloggers have been asking me for advice concerning their profiles and Pinterest strategy and I have already had a look at several accounts and gave them advice about what they could improve. Just recently, my lovely flatmate You and I DIY and her photographer friends approached me and asked me for a private Pinterest workshop. Thus, I put together my knowledge, created an info sheet and spent an evening sharing what I know about this awesome platform and answered their questions. To sum up everything, I put together some of the information for you as well. Have fun and let me know in case you have something to add! :)
Why you should use Pinterest:
Discover, save, do: Pinterest is the perfect place to discover new trend topics, get inspired, save and sort ideas and then put them into use. It is for example great to collect useful business tools and advice, to acquire new skills and to simply save what visually inspires you. Pinterest is a great place for learning something new.
Over 90% of users are women. Depending on your target group, it is awesome to have such a huge audience.
The half-life period of a pin on the virtual discovery tool is way longer than the one of any other posting on social media channels like Instagram or Facebook. On Instagram, for example, people usually only scroll their current timeline and rarely discover people's postings from a few days ago. Thus, content which is older is barely prominently visible anymore. But on Pinterest, as long as other people discover and share your pins, the number of repins becomes higher after a while, your content can work for you and steadily increases your website's traffic over time when you pin images that people are attracted to. This way, you can gain new readers and your website's user statistic becomes more impressive for potential clients, since more people see the content you are posting.
Pinterest can perfectly be used as a visual portfolio to represent your brand, projects and taste and to express your style. It is completely up to you to curate content according to your personal asthetics and you can also show your own work: for example, I use Pinterest to collect photos that other people took of my handmade products or to keep track of other people mentioning me in a business context.
Group boads can be used for organization, to work on projects with others and also to increase your reach, because you can also profit from the reach of the other group members. As one fun project, I created the board 'My Happy Pops Of Color' a while ago and invited people whose taste I like. Since then, we have been filling this board with hundreds of inspiring images.
Secret boards are an awesome means to collect inspiration just for yourself without your followers knowing about it. They are for example a great tool to put together gift ideas, to organize parties, to make a visual briefing or to plan holidays.
Advice to improve your Pinterest profile:
Improve the profile itself:
To use Pinterest in order to attract more follwers, to be found easily and to have extra fun while pinning, here are a few ideas to improve your profile without much effort:
Varify your website to increase your credibility. To do so, you have to insert a mega tag provided by Pinterest.
Improve your profile description by adding your name, information about where to find you elsewhere, by adding focus topics you want to be related to and an outstanding profile picture. Also improve your board titles by using SEO-friendly (clear expressions and not cryptic, e.g. 'Bedroom interior' instead of 'Furniture for my favorite cozy place'), specific and easy to read headlines. Also take care of your board descriptions (long texts which are nice to read, but still full of keywords, helping users to find your content through the search), pin descriptions and cover images (make navigation easy and help people to quickly find the content they are looking for).
Optimize the structure of your boards: most important content should come first. Nobody wants to scroll through 80 boards to find your favorite ones. Your content should be easy to find and you need a clear arrangement of boards.
Find a good balance between pinning own content and curating and repinning the content of others.
Add a value to your pins, because people want to discover and to learn. No matter if you are pinning your own content or photos taken by other people, make sure to add a value to your pins. This may for example be educational content like DIY tutorials, recipes or a guide for how to make a great media kit, or this may be hair styling tips or a good photography tutorial. You could also pin a travel or city guide with your favorite places and recommend spots that others should visit.
Create a business account to use Pinterest Analytics in order to get insights into your website's most successful content, to find out more about your audience and followers and to get an overview of popular content on your profile. For me, it was super helpful to see which content from my website people really like. As you can see in my statistics, my profile has an average of 200.000 daily impressions which is pretty cool. Moreover, I currently reach about 970.000 monthly viewers, which is nearly a million (!!!).
When looking at the specific statistics of your domain, you can see the interplay with your Pinterest account. Your website provides content and your Pinterest account provides traffic and enlarges your audience in case you pin good content. In this example, you can see how many impressions the original pins from my website received in the last 30 days, how many clicks to my blog they generated, how often they have been saved and how many likes they got. This is an amazing feature to monitore your content and to see what's popular among your readers. Moreover, it is also an awesome option to see how the content of a cooperation is performing on Pinterest and you can use it as a basis for your monitoring and reporting.
Pin frequency: pin on a regular basis and find out at which time to pin best and when your followers are most active. I often use spare time during train rides to enjoy looking through my Pinterest time-line. Moreover, take into consideration where your main audience is from, e.g. from the US or Germany, and take into account which time of the day it is there while you are pinning.
Pin quality and topics: pin images displaying niche topics and create boards that are more specific to stand out in the masses of pinboards, e.g 'DIY: Leather Handbags' instead of just creating DIY boards in which you pin all various kinds of projects. Apart from my basic DIY board, I created boards for all different kind of special DIY topics to make content clusterering more visible and to find the right project at any time.
Use affiliate links when pinning products and use affiliate services in order to gain some income through your pins and the traffic you redirect from them to a webshop.
Tidy up your boards and delete content which you have pinned a while ago and which does not express your style and visual language anymore. Thus, followers do not get distracted and you ensure an overall coherent visual expression.
Pay attention to the importance of giving proper credit to other people's work and intellectual property. When you fill Pinterest with new content, make sure to only pin from the original source and add a solid pin description.
Make your website or blog pin-friendly:
To make pinning from your website easier for yourself and your followers, read the following advice:
Fill your blog or website with vertical format images, they are discovered and pinned more frequently and better stand out in the time-line on Pinterest.
Activate rich pins which are pins with additional information for even more service and informational value for your followers (there are rich pins for products, places, recipes, articles, apps and movies). My wonderful friend Katha from Kathastrophal has written a great guide for how to activate rich pins (in German) which empowered me to do it myself a while ago.
Use the 'Pin it!' button on your website and also add the Pinterest button to your own browser.
Make your content pinnable and create graphics for blog content to be pinned. They should match your overall brand's visual aesthetics and for example contain your standard fonts, colors and typical photo motifs. Create customized and oversize pins: create pins including various images and typo for one project or post. Those pins are longer than conventional pins, stand out more in people's time-lines and can be uploaded manually. This is also a great way to promote old website content and gain even more traffic.
Use the Pinterest widget to promote your Pinterest account in your blog / on your website. Open one of your boards, click onto the three dots on the top and create a widget. You can then choose the size and the style and embedd it in the sidebar or directly in blogposts when it fits the topic.
Hooray, Pinterest is awesome! Let me know in case you have something to add, if you have criticism or of you have questions. :)
And in case you want to go more into detail, simply contact the Pinterest team, e.g. Pinterest DACH, or visit the Pinterest business page.
If you liked this article and found it helpful, feel free to share it:
Happy day and thank you for reading! :)
Lu
P.S.: No, this is not a sponsored coop post, I simply truly love Pinterest and use it for my creative everyday work. Yay! :)