And we’re back with more social media guides! This post will be tackling Pinterest in’s and out’s, advertising, and more.
Pinterest is often referred to be the most worthwhile platform for bloggers. I’d argue that is mostly the case depending on your niche. Some niches do better on Pinterest than others, which is why knowing your audience and where they are are useful for understanding whether any platform will work for you. However, all niches can have success on Pinterest with some thoughtful planning. So let’s get into how to best use Pinterest.
Promotion
Setting Up Your Profile
Pinterest now has business profiles, and as a blogger wanting to use Pinterest to seriously promote, you should definitely have one. You’ll be able to advertise easily and access analytics on your content which is hugely beneficial to know if your Pinterest strategy is working. You also get a different profile layout, where you can feature specific boards and other activity. You can easily switch to a business profile from the standard profile if you’re already using Pinterest.
If you’re starting completely from scratch, you’re going to need boards. Boards are where you organize your pins on your profile. You should definitely create at least one board for your blog to make it clear and easy to find that content. You should also create other boards that relate to your overall brand that give you places to pin other people’s pins, which is good for you overall and I talk more about later. Other boards can be group boards, which I talk more about later in this section.
One of my favorite parts of Pinterest is sections within boards. In a particular board, you can create subsections to better organize your pins. I use this in my blog’s board to organize in broad categories (seen above). When you write about a variety of topics like I do on A Geek Girl’s Guide, sections are super useful.
Anatomy of a Pin
Pinteresting is very visual, so your image choice makes a huge difference. Vertical graphics perform better and look better in the feed. Pinterest specifically says 600 x 900 pixels is optimal – or any 2:3 aspect ratio.
Since vertical performs better, you’ll have to make Pinterest pins that are different from your other post graphics, which tend to be horizontal. Canva is a great option for a free tool to make these graphics. It’s also really useful if you don’t have a lot of graphic design experience but want very professional looking pins.
You can create pins on Pinterest itself, but I recommend scheduling them in advance along with everything else you schedule for a post. As I have said in other posts, I use Later to do this. You can schedule it to post to a specific board, have its link and a caption prewritten, and don’t have to worry about it. The only thing I wish Later had was the ability to specify the section in a board. But I am still very happy with the scheduling experience on Later and the convenience of using that for multiple platforms. There are other platforms recommend for Pinterest, like Tailwind, but I don’t use them myself so not much knowledge there.
Collaborating with Group Boards
Group boards are a board that multiple people can pin to. Bloggers use them all of the time and they do help getting your pins, and thus your posts, in front of more people. You can find niche specific boards as well as broad boards.
Most of the time, the board is part of a larger blogging group you’d have to be a part of to pin to. You can also find group boards that are just run by an individual and have guidelines for joining. Do some digging by searching on Pinterest for these kinds of boards and definitely join relevant ones. I have both niche geeky group boards as well as broader blogging ones that I pin to when the post is relevant to that group. Guide to Blogging posts often go in the broad boards as an example.
Speaking of group boards, if you’re a geek blogger, Geek Blogs Unite has a group Pinterest board!
Engagement
Pinterest is more of a search engine than a social platform really, so it has more similarities to the likes of Google than Facebook. But we talk about it within the social platforms for a few reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that there is a give and take. You do need to be actively pinning stuff yourself for your pins to be seen.
Unlike other platforms, Pinterest is not an engagement platform. The extent of engagement is just pinning pins. You can get followers to your boards, but ultimately your follower number matters significantly less on Pinterest than your analytics (views, reach, clicks, etc.) So instead of trying to build a community, you’re really just aiming to get your content seen.
Advertising
As per usual, I recommend reading the Intro to Social Advertising post to get you all set up for advertising on Pinterest.
Making an ad on Pinterest is super easy and straightforward because it’s just promoting a pin. So you will choose a pin you already have and add in the various information needed that I cover in the social advertising post (target keywords, duration, budget, etc). And that is basically it! Super straightforward.
You can also access your current and past ads in the business hub that you get with a business account to help you keep track of everything. It also gives you analytics specifically for the ad, which is great to see if that ad was worthwhile.
What should you advertise on Pinterest? As usual, it is up to you. I choose my Pinterest ads very much based on the season and any holidays or events happening. Since Pinterest is more of a search engine, promoting your content seasonally works out well as people will start searching for things (ie gift ideas before Christmas) at a specific time of year and if you have content for that, promote it.
And that is the quick rundown of using Pinterest for your blog! It is definitely worth exploring, especially with the search engine mindset.
