With questions coming in from our ShopStyle Collective Community about Pinterest, we tapped Tailwind’s resident Pinterest expert, Alisa Meredith, and ShopStyle’s Social Manager, Courtney Gilford, for answers. Read on for insights into how to up your Pinterest game!
Q: Are there any tips and tricks you have for influencers starting out on Pinterest?
AM: Realize that follower count is not your most important metric. Pinners with small followings can create incredible impact in terms of reach, Saves (repins), clicks, and website traffic. Not all Pinners with huge followings can boast the same.
With that in mind, you’ll want to communicate expectations with your partners and clients, and you should use UTM URLs on everything you pin for someone else (but you knew that!).
Don’t get discouraged! On Instagram, growth and engagement are pretty quick. On Pinterest, you may be doing a great job for six months or more before you feel like it’s really “working.” Don’t expect quick results, instead remind yourself that the work you are doing now will pay off for years — literally.
Spend time on your images. If you pin the same images as every other influencer, it’s going to be difficult for you to stand out. Invest in your own photography, or at the very least, create mood boards, collages, etc. with the images you’re given.
CG: Just starting out on Pinterest can seem like a daunting task, but after jumping in and starting to pin, the platform becomes second nature and a totally addictive way to share content with your followers.
Take a look at the content you are posting to other platforms and group it into themes. Start with these themes as your first boards. For example, you may be starting to post Fall fashion, so creating a board called “Fall Outfit Ideas” is a great way to repurpose the content you are already sharing. When pinning, make sure to utilize your ShopStyle links to monetize your Pinterest!
Lastly, as Alisa also stated, spend time on your images. They are a reflection of you as an influencer, so always put your best foot forward. Your content is what makes you unique, so spend time curating your boards to reflect your style!
How can you get creative with a Pinterest strategy?
AM: Your audience wants to pin more content than you can create on your own. Figure out what they’re interested in beyond your own content (look at Pinterest analytics – People you reach – Interests). If you see that your audience is intoquotes (and most are), can you create a board for quotes that are related to your niche? Even if you don’t create your own quote images (though you could start to include one in every blog post), you can pin other people’s images to your own boards.
Create and curate boards that allow you to showcase your own content in several ways. For instance, you might have one board for “Stylish Work Wear” and another for “Easy Work Wardrobes,” and they could have nearly identical content. Some items from these boards would also fit on your “trends” boards or “colors of the season” boards. Just adapt your pin descriptions to make them relevant to the board you’re pinning to at the moment. This will help your pins surface in search on Pinterest — and perhaps even get your pins, boards, or account into Google search results.
Make good use of group boards for collaboration. Brands will sometimes invite influencers to pin to one or more of their boards — ask if that’s a possibility for you! This not only gives the brand a source of great content that lives on their accounts, but it also allows more people to discover you! Here is an example.
CG: As we get closer to holiday, this is the perfect opportunity to start generating and saving (pinning) more content. More content = more engagement! Holiday pins start to peak well in advance of the actual holiday, so thinking through your content early is key. Create boards around these new themes at least a month (or more!) in advance and fill them with relevant pins. For example, a “Holiday Gift Ideas” board or a board called “Holiday Outfit Inspiration” can go up in October to start gaining traction.
You can also partner with other influencers on Pinterest to create a group board. This will allow everyone to pin content to a single board that will live on all members’ Pinterest accounts, meaning more eyes are on this board.
Pinterest is an inspirational platform. If it makes sense for your audience, create boards to inspire across various categories like travel, recipes/cooking, etc. and save others people’s pins if you don’t have original content for that category. You may even find a category that your followers are interested in that you can share across other platforms!
Speaking of other platforms, cross-promoting can help get your followers from one platform to follow you on another. Make a note at the end of your blog post reminding your readers to follow you on Pinterest or include a pinnable graphic that they can pin directly from your post.
How do you recommend growing your audience/engagement on Pinterest?
AM: Make it easy and appealing for other people to share your content for you. This starts with your content (Will sharing this contribute to my desire to be a useful resource? Do the images make MY profile look good?).
While follower count matters less and less on Pinterest, getting found in search becomes more and more important.
Make your site a reputable source for good content, and that the pins you share from there are irresistibly shareable!
Creating great images: Aspect ratio (2:3), subtle branding, high quality images, and helpful, legible (especially on mobile) text overlays. Lifestyle images tend to convert better than product images, but product images can help your pins surface in Lens. Try both! Also try combining lifestyle and product images into an appealing collage.
Use good SEO: Use your keywords in image file names, pin descriptions, board titles and descriptions, and your profile.
Pin good content that is relevant to your board titles.
You can also try promoted pins, but you’ll probably find that you get the best results from traffic campaigns that send people to your blog rather than directly to a product listing.
CG: Pinning quality content first and foremost is your best bet. Your original content is unique to you so sharing that will set you apart from others on Pinterest.
Search is huge on Pinterest, so using keywords in your pin descriptions is important. It takes time, but adding thoughtful descriptions to each pin will help your pins pop up in relevant searches. You can also add descriptions to each of your boards to help with searchablility.
Keep an eye on your Pinterest analytics to see which of your pins and boards are performing best and generating the most engagement (take a look at Saves and Clicks). At ShopStyle, we check our analytics daily and these help guide us towards the types of content that are working and that we should be pinning more of.
How can Tailwind help optimize an influencer’s Pinterest?
AM: Smart schedule — Consistently pinning at the best times helps your pins surface more and more often, leading to greater engagement, follower growth, and website traffic. (Here’s why timing still matters.)
Board Insights and other analytics — See which boards are working for you (and those that are not). This is particularly important for group boards. Check to make sure they are still helping and not hurting, and see which boards you should spend more time on. See which pins are doing really well and make more like that (sometimes it’s not the ones you would expect!).
Interval pinning — Earlier we talked about the reasons for sharing your content to more than one board. With interval pinning you can select more than one board for each scheduled pin, and tell Tailwind how far apart you’d like them to be pinned.
Use Tailwind with our exclusive ShopStyle link for a free trial!
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