How to use Pinterest

How to use Pinterest

I’m sure this is in no way your first brush with Pinterest as a term or a social platform. However, despite is popularity; it is surprisingly common to meet people who do not understand what Pinterest is or how to use it. In this article, we shall look at how to use Pinterest. Let use commence by looking at what it is.

What is Pinterest?

The name Pinterest comes from combining two terms: pin and interest. As you can derive from the name, Pinterest is a platform that allows you to ‘pin’ aka collect images from the web and add them to your ‘board’. A board is simply a category of your collection. For example, if your ‘pins’ are recipes, your board would read recipes. When you create a board, you have the opportunity to write a description about that board to remind you why you ‘pinned’ that image. For example, if you ‘pin’ a gluten free cupcake recipe, you could say, “I have to make this for my best friend Mary who is trying to lose weight.” When you pin an image, it links back to the original post available on the mother website.

Contrary to popular belief and despite the fact that about 80% of Pinterest user base is feminine who use the platform to get inspiration in areas such as recipes, braids, wedding planning and dresses, Pinterest has many uses. Currently, the site is very popular with designers, businesses, universities, news outlets etc. The popularity of Pinterest is perhaps because the platform has become integral to social sharing especially given the simple fact that people have been widely proven to want to share posts that have images than those that don’t have images.

Now that you have a firm understanding on what Pinterest is, let us get you started in how to use the platform.

 

Three ways to use Pinterest creatively

Use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog

Pinterest is the third most popular social media platform. This means that it has a very active user base. In fact, to some marketers and bloggers, Pinterest drives more traffic than G+, LinkedIn or YouTube combined. To drive traffic to your blog or website, you can use Pinterest as a blog think tank for idea as well as search for content ideas on the platform. Once you find these content ideas, you can then create content around this topics and pin them. This will drive traffic to your website. However, you have to ensure that your website in Pinterest friendly.

Use Pinterest to strengthen your brand

Pinterest is a good way to strengthen your brand, its image and visibility. The good thing about this is that you do not need to spend all your time on the platform tweaking your profile and pinning all day. You simply need to sign up for an account and populate it with content and then other users do the pinning for you. Then all you have to do is bookmark the search URL, check this bookmark regularly and comment on any pins where your brand attracts a mention. Commenting on mentions of your brand is very important as it shows appreciation for those who have taken time to pin.

Use Pinterest for Market research

Pinterest is the best market research tool any marketer could have. The platform is full of ideas ranging from products, recipes (you saw that one coming), general ideas, and many people ready and willing to give input on your products and pins. In fact, if you didn’t know, many internet marketers use the platform to generate niche ideas (it is that good). Further, market research using the platform is so easy that you could spend literally minutes in finding ideas and conducting research.

How to adjust your setting

Once you navigate the platform and get the hang of it, you may want to adjust your settings. You can do this by moving the mouse over the drop down menu on the upper right hand corner of the platform (next to your profile picture) and click on the settings options. You can then update your email, basic info and connect or disconnect your social accounts.

NOTE: Running a Pinterest account as a business is different from running a Pinterest account as an individual. Follow the prompts in this page if you want to create a business account.

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