11 Ways to Skyrocket Pinterest for your Creative Business

This week I attended a talk about Pinterest in Manchester, hosted by the lovely & super knowledgable Lizzie Sibley from Pinterest UK. I’ve used Pinterest for a while, but I’ve always been a little lazy with it, only recently have I really started putting any proper effort and strategy in my pinning. I learned so much stuff I didn’t know about Pinterest, so I thought I’d share it with you!

1 | Follower count doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. The majority of traffic on Pinterest is engaged with the search function rather than what’s on their home feed. Instead of concentrating on how many followers you have, concentrate on how accessible and search-friendly your pins and boards are. Pinterest is not a social media platform, it’s a “visual discovery tool”.

2 | Pinterest uses your board names, pin names and pin descriptions in its search. Be thorough and useful when writing your pin descriptions. Don’t be spammy with a multitude of hashtags, instead, write something meaningful and descriptive. You’re not restricted to 140 characters, so write away! Take care when writing your board descriptions, use plain English but be specific: “Casual Chic Style” would be more searchable than “Keeping it casual” and more specific than “My Style”. Always consider what people would be searching for when writing your board names.

3 | 80% of Pinterest users are using the app on their mobile or iPad, so if you’re trying to generate traffic to your website via Pinterest, then you’d better be damn sure your site’s mobile optimised (but we’ve already talked about why your website should be mobile optimised, haven’t we?).

4 | Don’t delete boards, just move them to the bottom of your profile. Some people might only follow one of your boards, so you don’t want to lose their engagement. Similarly, don’t delete pins — rearrange them, rename them, change their descriptions, and even their links.

5 | If you want to track your analytics on Pinterest (and why wouldn’t you?) then you need to register for a Business account. Don’t worry, you don’t technically need to be a business to use that service, and it’s totally free (just like Pinterest is and always will be!).

6 | Instead of just re-pinning content, be more active in pinning new things and creating new content to be shared on Pinterest. This is something I definitely need to get better at! It’s sooo easy to repin things, and even to change the description to fit with that you want to pin the image as, but it’s harder and therefore more valuable to pin brand new things.

7 | Start your “holiday boards” early — start pinning for Halloween in July and Christmas in August. Move these boards to the top of your profile during their active seasons, and to the bottom of your profile when it’s not their time to shine (remember, don’t delete them!).

8 | Make use of services such as Buffer to spread out your pins. This way you can avoid annoying your followers when you go on pinning splurges! You can also use services like this to un-annoyingly pin the same thing more than once, to different boards.

9 | Make sure that your site is Pinterest ready by using the variety of Pinterest tools available (such as the pin it button) and enabling Rich Pins on your site. If you’re using WordPress, so long as you have a decent theme and the Yoast SEO plugin installed then you should be good to go. If you’re on Shopify you’re also good to go. You simply need to follow the instructions on Pinterest to validate your site for Rich Pins.

10 | Vertical images perform much better than horizontal images, so make sure you’re creating your pinnable content with high impacting images. Using text on your images does deliver a higher pin-rate, but make sure it doesn’t look like a banner ad. List style posts & how-tos work really well when pinned on Pinterest!

11 | Don’t just pin your own content, that’s rubbish and boring, and totally not what Pinterest is about. I kinda like the Gary Veynerchuck way of marketing on social media (jab jab jab, right hook) and I think that works really well on something like Pinterest (maybe more like 9 jabs to every hook, though!).

And to help us all even further, I’ve started a brand new Pinterest board where I’m gathering useful articles related to Pinterest use. Click here to go straight to it if you can’t see it under this post… I’ll be adding content to this board regularly, so do let me know if you have a Pinterest article you’d like me to add there!

Let me know your Pinterest links in the comments so that I can follow you!!