Key areas we will cover in chapter 7:

• ✓ setting up a Pinterest page
• ✓ explaining pins and boards
• ✓ getting great images
• ✓ exploring business board ideas
• ✓ using Pinterest for content on other platforms.

Scrapbooking has long been the hobby of many so it makes sense that there is an electronic version of the popular pastime for the twenty-first century — it’s called Pinterest.

Quick facts on Pinterest

Here are some interesting Pinterest facts:

• It was launched in 2010.
• It has approximately 150 million active users.
• Eighty-five per cent of pinners are female.
• Eighty million users are outside the United States.
• It’s online scrapbooking.
• It can be linked to other social sites.
• There is a mobile app available.

Online scrapbooking made simple

The beauty of the digital version of scrapbooking is that everyone can see your scrapbooks if you have your privacy settings set as public, allowing you to share your favourite things for all to see. If you are a bricks-and-mortar store that sells products, this is another great option you can use to ensure more people see what you have to offer, particularly if you have a dreamy photogenic product such as food, design or fashion.

The secret to Pinterest success is sharing great images for others — and yourself — to admire and dream about. Imagine being able to gaze at perfect images of food, travel destinations, wedding dresses, fast cars, fashion and more — whatever your interests are.

In fact, any product that produces beautiful images and allows someone to dream will work on Pinterest. You can become a curator of your niche or product, drive traffic back to your main website, find like-minded people with your content and develop your own online profile within your field on Pinterest.

What is a pin?

Every image that you post to your Pinterest page, either directly from your computer or from a website, is a pin. When someone likes what you have posted they pass it on by reposting, or repinning, it to their own boards. You pin images onto boards instead of into a physical scrapbook — and that’s about it for the jargon side of Pinterest.

You don’t have to spend a fortune buying images, though. You can instantly pin images from websites as you see them. This can be done either by clicking on a ‘pin it’ button downloaded to your browser bar, or by clicking the ‘pin it’ buttons that appear alongside an image on a site you may be visiting. You can now commonly see the Facebook ‘like’ button doing a similar job. These little sharing calls to action are much more commonplace today than ever before, so the more of these prompts you have on your own main website to encourage others to share your product images, the better it is for you.

Setting up your Pinterest page

Let’s have a look at the mechanics of setting up your own Pinterest profile and boards.

Create your profile

You can create either a personal or a business page, depending on what you want from your page. I have created a combination personal and business page because I am Blue Banana, so it makes sense for me to drive traffic to one place rather than two. My page is called ‘Blue Banana 20 — Linda Coles’ so anyone looking for either name will find it.

Enter the basic information in the boxes as you go, making sure to add in your website as well as links to your other social channels. The more you can cross-share your content, the better, allowing others to find your other social channels easily. Add your profile picture — and that’s about it.

Create some boards

Think outside the box for your board names: get creative as well as obvious. For instance, you might split your travel boards into ‘places I have been’, ‘places I want to visit’ and ‘places I would like to get married’ and so on, thereby creating three very different boards on a similar subject.

If you are in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, like me, it can be tricky to come up with board names for your industry that contain great images, so I have created some called ‘cool blue things’ (obviously because of Blue Banana): ‘I aspire to meet …’ and ‘inspirational quotes’ as well as boards on social media and building relationships. There are also more personal boards such as fashion I like and shoes (of course). When I write novels, I start a board and add my characters or destinations for easy reference to flick back to. I also have a book cover board with various designs pinned to it.

Pinterest is certainly more relevant to some industries than others. Here are a few really good examples of great boards:

• www.pinterest.com/wholefoods
• www.pinterest.com/gap
• www.pinterest.com/gucci
• www.pinterest.com/nordstrom
• www.pinterest.com/pretzelcrisps.

They all have great photos and are all very dream-worthy — just what Pinterest is about — and there are also some quite quirky board ideas. I particularly like the Pretzel Crisps Genius Life Hacks board www.pinterest.com/pretzelcrisps/genius-life-hacks because it is really helpful information for around the home.

Think about some of the boards you would like to keep for yourself — nothing to do with your business, but a place to store your dreams and aspirations, your secret plans and your bright ideas. They don’t all have to be public boards; you can make private ones too, as well as public ones that you can share with nominated people. For instance, in developing my last book cover, I pinned some ideas to a board named ‘book cover ideas’ and shared it with my publisher so she could see my thoughts and add her own in too, making it a collaboration while at the same time allowing everyone else to see them. With secret boards, you can invite certain others to view them, which is really useful if you are planning your wedding and you don’t want the groom to see what you are planning but you do want your future sister-in-law to be able to see and perhaps contribute.

Whatever you name your boards, make the headings short and relevant, including a keyword if possible. You want the whole board name to show rather than ending in ‘…’, use no more than 20 characters, including spaces.

You can also rearrange your boards in order so that when visitors land on your Pinterest page for the first time, your best or most relevant boards show up top. Likewise, the main image on each board can be changed to the best one, with the others displayed along the bottom. First impressions matter.

Pinning

You can find content to share from the search function or from the drop-down menu on your profile page. You will find pictures on just about everything possible, apart from pornography, which is a definite no-no. Anything from animals to women’s fashion; there is even a popular section to see what is hot right now. Some of these images have been pinned thousands of times: imagine if you were the generator of that image, perhaps from your own website. What great exposure for you!

While I am writing this I am skipping between Pinterest and writing and I have just re-pinned a delicious-looking lemon, Greek yoghurt and cream cheese cake that has caught my eye. The nice thing about it is that the whole recipe on how to make the cake is attached, as well as the pin creator’s name and comments from others. Once I have pinned it, another option pops up and that is to embed the whole image and recipe onto my own website, linking back again to the originator. Now, if I was in the food business, I might do it, but it’s not going to work on a website about digital marketing. Shame! If, on the other hand, you were in the food business, you could create a whole page on your main website devoted to dreamy food pins to make your own site even more appealing, or turn your favourite board into a banner image running across a web page that updates when you add new pins, all by adding a short piece of code to your website.

But you don’t have to just re-pin from boards already on Pinterest: you can pin great images as you find them on other websites. The ultimate way is to create your own image and get others to re-pin it, or pass it on. Like all social media sites, the developers are constantly updating and changing functionality so I won’t discuss image sizes because they will probably change. I think it is safe, however, to say that long images (portrait) work better than wide images (landscape) because the board shape suits them better, so stick to long and slim where possible.

Make sure you use keywords relevant to your pin in the description box to enable others who are searching to find your work. Note that hashtags only really work as the keyword, not the actual hashtag as on Twitter (where it originated from), so don’t clutter the description with them. They do, however, serve as a sort of shorthand for what the content is about; for example, #lovevalentines tells me it’s about Valentine’s Day.

Adding the price of a product into the description is also a good idea as there is no other place to put it, unless you add it to the image, which would look a bit messy. After all, the image is the important hook to make you want more.

Pinning strategy

Like everything you do on social media, you need to incorporate pinning into your main marketing plan to be consistent and effective, so decide what you will pin and when.

A few things to consider with regard to your pinning content strategy:

• Pin consistently rather than in bursts then drought periods.
• Pin from different sources.
• Pin original content where possible.
• Decide on keywords that need to be incorporated into your descriptions.
• Use images on your website for others to pin from.
• Re-pin others’ original content and comment on it where possible.

Pinning etiquette

Pins, re-pins, commenting and liking all carry the same etiquette as on all the other sites: just be your normal, friendly self and thank others for contributing to your pins or respond to others’ comments as applicable, just as you would if someone was interacting with you in reality.

Conclusion of chapter 7

Pinning is great fun as well as a great tool for many businesses, particularly fashion and food-based ones! It’s also a great place to put things to review later, such as articles that you come across, and I now have boards packed with things to do or read later!

If you post great images, not just good ones, you are on the right track. Happy pinning.