pinterest pro tips.

as one of the original pinners, i'm sharing a few practices to find inspiration, have fun and grow your following.

i’ve been a huge fan of pinterest since i met founder ben silbermann back in 2010, and he introduced me to his brand-new platform. since then, i’ve made several visits to the pinterest offices for a little ‘tune-up,’ shall we say, on my account. it was rather eye-opening, to say the least, especially when i realized i had not been using pinterest to its full potential for many, many years. i do very well on the platform, and it’s actually the number one driver of traffic to my blog — for instance, i currently have over 10,000,000 views per day from pinterest, versus nowhere near that on instagram since they’ve instigated the algorithm. but to think that i could have been doing far better on pinterest was a wake-up call, and as one of the original pinners, i’d like to share what i learned with you. also, i don’t know about you, but while other social platforms have gotten super political, violating our privacy or simply messing with what they think we want to see, i’m really just so happy to hop on pinterest and only find joy and inspiration, and never a political ad.

so, if you’ve been looking to improve your following on pinterest, or support a business, or just want to have a better experience searching for the kind of content you’d like to see, i’ve been doing some creative consulting with pinterest on what it can do to improve and i’d like to let you in on what i learned in an on-going blog series of tips i’ll call pinterest practices for pros. i don’t want to overwhelm you, so i’m going to start with the main priority in using pinterest — the all-important description.

pinterest descriptions:
• first off, what you may not know is that you may not have been describing your content to the best of your ability. a great pinterest strategy is about frequency, quality, and SEO (search engine optimization). the better you get at this, the more your pins will be seen, and the more your following has the opportunity for growth. for good SEO on pinterest you’ll want to focus on doing the following:

• prioritize writing 1-2 human-readable sentences that describe your content or idea with great, search-friendly keywords. think about how you search on pinterest and what keywords you would use to find what you’re looking for.

• remember this: you have 500 characters per pin description. here’s an example of a sample pin with description and hashtags (just below).

• don’t do what i was doing and name your boards or content with something you might find clever or fun if no one can find it. for example, i had a board called aqualand (just above) which i just thought to be so fun — but seriously, when you’re searching for aqua blue or pale blue or turquoise inspiration would you ever on earth search for aqualand? i doubt it. i’ve renamed it simply aqua blue, which is an easy-to-find board.

• then, you can add up to 20 hashtags to reiterate keywords, capture other keywords you might’ve missed, or of course, hashtag brand sponsors or #sponsored if applicable. hashtags describe the image to the best of your ability, so for instance: #vintage #black #eameschair #chair #diningchair — anything you’d think of to search to find the image if you were on the hunt.

pro tip:
• if you get stuck on what good keywords are, just plug in something like “socks” or “guest room” into pinterest search and see what the top related terms are. to see some good examples within the ‘home category,’ for instance, check out hunker or remodelista’s content — they do a great job that i try to emulate.

board titles:
• special characters such as | * ~ etc. will “break” the search-friendliness of your board titles, so don’t use any special characters to describe your boards. i was doing that, and it made them rather difficult to search.

• also, consider search-friendly keywords in the titles themselves, ie: jewelry — i was using ‘baubles’ which again, may be witty and fun if you think like me, but people rarely search for ‘baubles’ when searching for jewelry, right?

okay, that’s it for this lesson! if you have any questions or comments, please let me know, and i’ll do my best to guide you. up next — pinterest idea pins. you can create diy’s, video home tours, carousel images to share just about anything you like. more on that next time. cheers, and here’s to pinning!