How to Pinterest: Quick List for Success

Ready for an easy, quick list of how to Pinterest in your best form? Don’t just think about Google and be afraid to work some Pinterest love to drive interest to your site! Offer something useful to your audience appealingly and gain some traction.

How to Pinterest

Stay in the Know

• Keep up to date with news from the Pinterest site itself, either their news or their Trends page for ideas and information.
• Learn from Pinterest for free.
  • How to Create Pins
• Keep informed by hanging out with groups of pro-bloggers to see if Pinterest algorithm changes occur. IF SO, keep in mind that often people don’t know what is happening under the covers and so there is a lot of speculation. So keep an open mind, but use your brain and think about what’s happening and how to adjust. Sometimes it even seems like Pinterest is still fine-tuning what’s going on, and possibly implementing A/B tests of their own that may not be long term, depending on their results!

What to Share

• Your own fantastic posts.
• Share things that solve your customer’s problems or help them.
• Curate GREAT things for your audience.
• Share videos.
• When you go into a Pin, click on the magnifying glass in brackets to see other pins that resemble this pin. This can help you see what you’re up against with your pin. You may also select subsections to find others using certain templates and such if you wanted to see if your look is ‘overdone’. It can also show you other pins that may explain something better before you go off to a link!

Brand Identity

• Keep on point when pinning, make sure to always consider your brand and pin appropriately.
• Balance the desire to have your brand identifiable with also wanting to test new pins and or not look like yet another Canva template pin.
• Use a secret board to pin things you’re still considering or checking out. For items you enjoy for yourself, keep them on your personal Pinterest site.
• Add your company, brand, or URL to your pin. This also helps to make pin thievery more difficult.

Get People Pinning

SEO for Pinterest

When working on your best efforts on How to Pinterest, keep in mind that Pinterest is more like a visual search engine than a social media outlet. So optimize as much as you can.

• Intrigue – Remember to intrigue your audience enough that they will engage. Base your pin on solving a pain point or offering a solution for your avatar.
• Length – About 30 characters will show on the Pinterest title in a user’s feed.
• Rich Pins – Use rich pins if possible. Types of rich pins are:
  • Place pins – address, phone, map
  • Article pins – headline, author, description, link
  • Recipe pins – ingredients, cook times, servings
  • Movie pins – title, ratings, cast, reviews,
  • Product pins – real-time proving, where to buy, availability
• Description – Make you pin descriptions up to two sentences long. Use keywords and a few hashtags. When you have Pinterest save buttons on your post images, then click on them to change the description. You can type a hashtag and suggestions will appear. Test different lengths to see what performs the best with your audience.
• Description tag – To have pin descriptions appear on pinning, inspect your image and make it so that the <img> tag includes the data-pin-description=”Intriguing description goes here. #Interesting”. Change this to be your verbiage. Don’t update your alt tag, that’s for people with screen readers and/or in case the image won’t load.
• Call to Action – Add a clear and concise Call to Action (CTA) to your pins.

Visually Appealing Pins

• Variety – Create multiple Pinterest images for your posts. Give your users something great to share.
• Horizontal – Use the 2:3 or 1.3:5 scale of your images so they render well on Pinterest. See post on Pinterest recommended sizes and ratios. Too long of pins may get cut off.
• Text – Add interesting text overlay to intrigue your users. Identify and use good font pairings. Avoid unreadable, too fancy script fonts.
• Colors – Light, bright colors typically pins perform better, but be sure your fonts stand out.
• Updated – If it’s been a while since you’ve updated your pins, look at them with a scrutinizing eye and be honest with yourself about if any of them need updating.
• Non-Canned – Try to avoid looking like an updated canned template. Some people are using new formats, or image sources to avoid this. Some people vary their pins more so they are not quite as brand identifiable but are more visually interesting.
• Verify – Test your pins from different size devices. Many people mainly use their cellphones anymore. Make sure they can read the pins on mobile devices.

Good Pinning Practices

• Be consistent with your pinning efforts and pin often.
• Schedule pins. Try varying times. Depending on your niche or locale, consider scheduling your pins for a more variable schedule to reach more interested eyes on your content!
• Don’t look like a spammer and re-pin the same pin over and over. While Pinterest doesn’t say what the number of repins on the same pin per time period counts as spammy, it can be good if you create multiple pins, anyway. That way you can even tell what gets more traction, but also avoid the spamminess.
• Jump on a trend, if it makes sense by checking out the Popular page. Think about how a hot item may be a hit.
• Use rich pins if possible. Types of rich pins are:
  • Place pins – address, phone, map
  • Article pins – headline, author, description, link
  • Recipe pins – ingredients, cook times, servings
  • Movie pins – title, ratings, cast, reviews,
  • Product pins – real-time proving, where to buy, availability
• Be sure to be fair and interested in others and pin their stuff, too.
• Be careful with link shorteners on Pinterest, they may trigger a security or SPAM alert.
• Add your URL or brand to your pin.

Metrics

• Review your Pinterest analytics and learn how to understand them.
• Track traffic sent to you from your pins.
• Check to see who is pinning what from your site. Check on this by going to the URL: https://pinterest.com/source/<your url>. These are items people are pinning from your site. Repin some of these on appropriate boards every day. If you find old posts that are being pinned, consider updating your pinnable image or adding another to the post.

Pinterest

Pinterest Profile

• Make sure your business name and URL are on your bio/profile.
• Tell your clients what you offer to them.
• Jazz up your profile.
• If you get banned, use creators-support@pinterest.com, help@pinterest.com, and/or fill out the form at https://help.pinterest.com/en/contact. You may need to reach out multiple times or provide additional details when requested.
• Verify what you have pinned by going to your profile and clicking ‘Your Pins’.
• Scope out profiles of users who follow you on Pinterest to gather an idea of your audience member demographics and other associated interests.

Pinterest Boards

• Categorize every board.
• Make your boards interesting.
• Come up with a nice header.
• Organize your boards.
• Remember about brighter colors doing better.
• Be sure to have a board where you pin all your content.
• Consider having a board with all your resources.
• Try using Pinterest guided search to create good board titles and descriptions. Find a board similar to what you want. Search now for key terms and see what you get for the guided search. Use one name that brings up the most relevant looking items in the guided search but then also enter those terms in the description.

Tools/Automation

• Think about automating your workflow with something like IFTTT or Zapier. Some bloggers offer courses on automation.

WordPress Plugins

• Use a social sharing plugin on your WordPress site to make it so others may easily share and pin your posts.

Tailwind

• Schedule pins with Tailwind.
• Use tribes.
• Look at the underlying analytics for performance in Tailwind analytics. Be sure you are only using good, performing Group boards that match your business topic.