Pinterest Marketing Part-2
Pinterest Basics For Marketing
Hopefully, that’s convinced you that you should start paying more attention to Pinterest. The next question then is… how?
How does Pinterest work? What does it offer that’s different from other social networks? And how do you go about getting set up?
Essentially, Pinterest works by allowing you to create ‘mood boards. Anyone who has done an art course will be familiar with this term. For everyone else, a mood board is essentially a collage made up of images and other materials that you’ve found on the web. This lets you collect images and notes from anywhere online and categorize them in one spot as a ‘board’. These boards can then be shared by other users and brands and you can follow either individual boards or users if you’d like to see more that they’ve created or collected.
To find images to pin to your boards, you can either browse other boards and then ‘repin’ the content you like, you can save images from the web and use social sharing buttons, or you can create your own content to upload to the site. You can use the inbuilt search tools in Pinterest to search for users, for boards, or for specific items. If you want to see images of ‘futuristic fonts’ for instance, then you can search for that string and you’ll be provided with a ton of images that other people and brands have pinned. Images have hashtags on them which describe their content and this then helps you when you’re searching for more content.
The key difference that Pinterest has when compared to something like Facebook then, is that the social aspect is actually not at the forefront. You can keep the boards you create as ‘private’ if you like and this then means that no one else will see them. This means you can use it simply to collect ideas for your own projects or for your general inspiration – and CEO Ben Silbermann actually describes the tool as a ‘catalog of ideas rather than a social network. His hope is that it can be used to inspire people to, in his words, ‘go do that thing’.
Once you’re following a number of boards and users, you’ll also be able to see pins that your contacts have pinned or commented on. You’ll also have images based on similar pins you have uploaded. This creates a ‘home feed of sorts that you can browse just to find images you might find interesting or inspiring, or to see what your friends are up to.
Not sure what you want to search for? You can also use a button along the top in order to browse popular pins in specific categories – whether that’s fashion, wedding, sports, art, architecture, or pets.
Like any social network, Pinterest also offers a plethora of social elements. Other than using it to browse different users’ content and edit it, it can also allow you to post comments on the pins you like (or don’t like!), or to re-pin the content you enjoy and thereby share it with your own network. It’s also possible to invite people to edit your boards and to set them up to be informed every time you add a new pin to it. This is a great feature for working on collaborative projects for instance and the boards are known as ‘group boards’.
There are many more features to Pinterest than this. In fact, even if you have been using Pinterest for a while there’s a very good chance that you won’t have seen everything it has to offer and that you won’t know all the different things you can do with the platform. Further in this book, we’ll be looking at some of those more advanced features in more detail and seeing how you can utilize them for marketing benefits
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