How to Master Pinterest Like a Boss

I was reluctant at first to use pinterest. Focusing already on instagram and trying to grow my network there took so much time and pinterest seemed like a board of things I collected anyway and didn’t necessarily share with the world. But what do you know, pinterest does actually give you traffic where instagram fails to do just that. And if you are clever about creating themed boards and imagery, you can grow fast and efficiently. Here’s how you can master pinterest like a boss.

Repin

As always, being social means to not only put your own content out there (aka talking about yourself) but to give others the possibility to shine. A good thing is to remember that pinterest aims to be an inspiration board, which requires you to collect images that inspire you and they can’t possibly all of your own creation. So ‘heart’ and repin like crazy because those are the main currency; comments are not as easy to get.

Impressions

If I entered your pinterest URL, what should I expect to see? Carefully worded board names with beautiful cover images and a descriptive text and category. If your images are beautiful but do not go well together, I will not be very happy to take a closer look. There are way too many pinteresters out there, so make the first impression count!

Numbers

The more boards and pins you have, the better. Sure, you need to be selective and think about the overall aesthetics but remember, you can always delete pins that lose their charm or relevance. Your boards should already have a number of pins that at least fill the whole screen.

Secrecy

In case you want to create boards that are not meant for the public (yet) or completely stock boards and publish them when they are already perfectly made up, you can use the secret board function. Beware that once it’s public, you can never take it back! If you want to switch pins between secret and public boards, you have to repin and then delete them.

Team Effort

Did you know you can group manage boards? Just create a board and invite your pinterest friends (they have to follow you) and you can share your content this way. A good tip is to join such boards yourself and share your own content regularly but not too often. But don’t share one pin across all boards! If you are using pinterest, why not use it to make your team work easier as well? For example, your boards can be used as whiteboards, bookmarks, topic collections or for testings.

Colour

With instagram, one colour should dominate but pinterest loves its rainbow in full splendour! So do not be afraid of multiple dominant colours as they receive three times more repins. And another factor that is directly the opposite to instagram is the choice of colour as well. Blues do not go as well as warmer colours, such as reds, orange and browns. (Think about matching the logo’s colour)

Composition

Similar to instagram this time is the background. Busy pictures are not as well received as those without a background. Aim for 40 percent or less background. And when the background is missing, you also want moderate lighting and colour. Do not go too dark or light. It needs to pop against the white background but not hurt the eyes.

Faceless

While everyone loves to gain inspiration from cool and trendy people, you will actually gain more popularity if you don’t show their faces. Maybe it’s psychology behind this as people can imagine themselves to be in the person’s shoes more easily if you don’t have a face.

Size

This one is pure logic and very savvy: the bigger your infographics and smaller the text images are, the more click-throughs they will get. Why? Nobody can read it and therefore need to click on it or even head over to the website to fully download it. Genius!

Call-to-Action

Same as always, if you tell people to click or be active, chances are they will do what you say. Just be nice about it. The top verbs for you to use are use, look, want and need.

Description

Now you can categorize your boards and the ones that are most popular are food&drink, DIY, home décor with travel only being number 15. So make sure you mix it up and show your linked interests as well! A key to mastering pinterest is to not spread yourself too thin.

Timing

Do not pin all your content in one session, but spread it out evenly. Services, such as tailwind already provide you the best times for you to pin and you can schedule the first 100 pins for free. After that, you can still save everything for free but you have to manually pin them. Or pay. So if you don’t have such a service, the best time is 8 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Analytics

If you get verified as a business, you can gain access to the analytics tools, where you can see your activity data from both your website and pinboards. It is a great way to see what your pinners like most and where you can get the best traffic. You can also get pretty good insights if you sign up for tailwind pro. If you want to give it a shot, here is a $15 tailwind voucher for you.

Timing

As with all social channels, you need to get your timing right when you want to master pinterest. Look at where your viewers are coming from and when they are tuning in. A good way to have such findings done for you is to use tailwind. It is a free source for storing pins to later publish and the first 100 you can schedule for free. You can set your time to your desired time zone and it will automatically detect which times are the best to send those out. Of crouse, you can still add or tweak those times. For tgose curious about getting more glimpses into more than basic stats, tracked pins and monitoring of your website activity in relation to pins, I recommend checking out pro for a month. And since you’re a valued reader of mine, you can have two months free with this $15 voucher.

Description

To master pinterest, there is no actual need for using hashtags as everything will be classified regardless. The only time you might want to use them is for a unique hashtag of yours or to stress a word. Or be ironic. But whatever the case each pin needs a description and this is ideally 20 characters long. The most repinnable words are food related, for instance, recipe, chicken, minutes and bake. The most pinned words are home related, i.e. love, home,things, style, ideas and stuff.

Button

Make it easiest for your audience and use the widget builder that already set the image, text and link for your audience to easily pin your posts. Alternatively you could install a pin plugin into your wordpress. There also is a handy pin add on for your browser to pin any image wherever you are browsing.

Inspiration

Inspiration is used by many people as their personal mood and idea boards. So, since you are looking at it from the provider side that wants to attract pinterest users and master pinterest, you ned to tailor your content to make it look attractive to your target audience. You can fall back on what works on other channels and adapt it to pinterst, while monitoring what works and what doesn’t. Also, you could and should have a look at similar pinteresters in your niche to get an idea of what is already there and what is popular, such as I did for the travel blogger sector pinterest.

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With pinterest you have a much wider creative scope of displaying your content and sharing other people’s as well, to create an image that perfectly conveys what you stand for and what emotions you want to create. PS: Don’t forget to check out my pinterest boards and learn how to master other social media channels (see below).

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https://blog.bufferapp.com/pinterest-marketing-guide-tips
http://karrierebibel.de/pinterest-tipps/
http://curalate.tumblr.com/post/119299858850/12-simple-tips-for-empowering-your-pins
http://blog.curalate.com/2014/02/06/8-image-features-that-shine-on-pinterest/
http://danzarrella.com/infographic-how-to-get-more-pins-and-repins-on-pinterest.html