12 Ideas For Shared Pinterest Boards

Sharing boards on pinterest is a good idea for many reasons, not least spreading awareness of your brand and generating traffic to your website and hence, increase sales/enquiries.

If you’ve been wondering about creating a shared board but weren’t sure of the topic, we have 11 ideas to help you in your strategy.

I recently set up a shared board on pinterest inviting others to share their ‘decorating stories’, mostly before and after pictures of upcycled furniture and redecorated rooms. What I have found is that more and more people are following that particular board than any of my other individual boards so it can be a great way to ensure your pins are seen by a wider audience.

I have recently been invited to join shared boards on Irish blogs and on wallpaper – which I will use to promote my own blogs and of course, the wallpapers I sell too.

If you are wondering how to set up a shared board on pinterest – here’s our explanation of how to do it.

Here’s some ideas for type of shared boards that would work well on Pinterest:

1. Travel Agencies –  invite clients to share some holiday photos onto a shared board.  Encourage your staff to share their photos there too.  This encourages interaction with your customers as well as providing photographs of your holiday destinations.

2.  Photographers – Creating ideas for a photoshoot and sharing the board with models, stylists and other participants. See how our photographer for the Grafton Media Blog Awards photoshoot used a shared board to inspire the photoshoot.

3. Organising Events:  Ask speakers to share photos / slides / videos before the event in order to promote themselves and the event.

4. Organising Exhibitions: Invite exhibitors to share photos of some of their products – this should attract attention from those considering attending the exhibition too.

5. Hotels – Ask guests to share photos of their stay there, of their meal, of the activities they took part in and local places they visited.

6. Travel Agencies – create a shared board for travel tips.

7. Fashion / Retail – ask people to share photos of themselves wearing clothes/accessories from your store. There are so many fashion blogs where people show photos of themselves that I think this would be a popular one.

8. Pet stores – people love showing pictures of their pets so create a shared board for their pets in cute poses or wearing the collars/accessories they purchased from your store.

9. Retail/ Exhibitor – create a shared ‘Trends’ board where people can share pictures they find of the latest trends. It becomes a treasure trove of ideas as well as creating a community feeling within your pinterest account.

10. Wool/Fabric shops – knitting, crochet and patchwork amongst other crafts, have become increasingly popular and people love to share photos of what they have created. Create a shared board for your customers.

11. Bookshops – create a shared board and invite people to submit reviews (link to their blog ) of recent books.  Bookclubs could create shared boards too.

12. Weddings – for anything to do with weddings, invite the couple to share pictures of wedding cakes, floral arrangements, wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses, honeymoon pictures ……  The bride will probably create shared boards to share with her bridesmaids and her photographer at the very least.

Many thanks to Elish of Irish Furniture  Fair for discussing the topic of shared boards with me and coming up with some of the ideas above.

Have you created shared boards?  Have you found them useful for your business? Do share your experiences with us. I hope these have given you some ideas for how you could create a shared pinterest board for your business.

Pinteresting Ways To Use Pinterest For Your Business

If you’re aware of Pinterest and you’ve been reading about it, you have probably read that some businesses are doing very well from Pinterest – both for increasing their brand awareness and for driving significant traffic to their website and generating sales.

However, if you’ve been wondering how else to use it besides trying to create content that gets repinned and goes viral, here are some ideas.

I recently gave a talk on pinterest for the KLCK bloggers network and I was trying to provide examples for how the various people in the listening group could use it for their business. One example was photography and I suggested that photographers could use examples of photographs for future shoots. We then had a chat about copyright issues as there is a very fine line between finding inspiration and breaking copyright rules unfortunately.

Our photographer for our upcoming Grafton Media Blog awards shoot, Damien Carroll,  was there and he went home with ideas forming in his mind. As we are three women organising the blog awards, we had come up with a “Charlie’s Angels” idea for the photoshoot but we were still rather doubtful.  Damien created a board for the photoshoot with various photographs from the original Charlie’s Angels from the 70s and 80s and the more recent film.

A picture tells a thousand words and once we saw the shared board (see our post on how to create a shared board if you need that information), we could visualise what he meant and what poses we thought were possible and might get us some publicity.

We chose the “Charlie’s Angels” pose from the film with the 3 characters in black and then we added our “Charlie” to the mix.

We also tried the “Angels Walk” pose and what was so valuable once we had decided on the poses too, was that the pinterest app was available on the iphone and we could glance at it, glance at the photos on the camera and see if we needed to adjust.

As Damien found, it is a fantastic way of putting mood boards and shoot plans together.  He is using Pinterest for more shoots by sharing the boards with mdoels, make-up artists and stylists and each person can add pins to the boards which leads to an interactive collaboration of ideas.  We will be using pinterest to plan our theme for the blog awards night too.

Dress makers could use pinterest to create boards of dresses and clients could choose the sleeves of one dress with the skirt of another, hairdressers could pin pictures of their models to demonstrate their skills, beauticians can pin pictures of nail art, food bloggers can include pictures of their recipes and the list goes on.

Have you found pinterest to be a handy tool for your business? We’d love to hear more examples.

Pinetiquette

As with all social media tools, there are written and unwritten rules as to how you use them. Pinterest isn’t any different and we’ve come up with our suggestions to ensure you know what you’re doing when you go to use it and you don’t break any pinetiquette rules.

1. Pin Little & Often – Don’t spend an hour pinning and auto-tweeting as it will annoy your followers on twitter for a start.  If I go to my pinterest page and see that one person I follow has pinned so many similar pins that it almost fills the page, I am likely to unfollow them so it is best to pin 2 or 3 of your own images, repin a few and leave it at that and then come back to it two or three times a day.
2. Don’t Self-Promote – Don’t fill your boards with your own products.  True pinners love visuals so they fill their boards with pictures they enjoy and love and this shows their personality and that of their brand. Follow the 80/20 rule – 80% other people’s products, 20% your products.
3. Credit the Source – If using a pin on your facebook page or within a blog post, always always always credit the source. You can use the embed button on pinterest to insert the pin in your blog post.
4. Personality – Show the personality of your brand by  creating boards that enhance or complement your services or your products e.g. a photographer could have a boards on wedding dresses, exotic locations, kids and gardens – to bring his/her business to the attention of engaged couples but also to show their personality and passions.
5. Your Reputation – If you are a business pinner then bear in mind the reputation of your brand when repinning or pinning images, for example, while many fashion pins may include women or men in scanty lingerie or underwear, a board containing such pins may not be expected by your audience and may damage your online reputation particularly if you are selling homewares or children’s furniture.
6. Reciprocate– Follow back those who follow you.
7. Twitter – if you are auto-tweeting from your pins, remember to check into twitter too to see if you’ve received any responses on your pinning.
8. Interaction – According to Repinly, we spend 0.5% of our time on pinterest commenting so it seems that we’re mostly interacting there by repinning rather than having conversations. Leave a comment on the occasional pin and if someone comments on one of your pins, do respond – it could be the start of a beautiful friendship 🙂

Have I missed any pinetiquette tips?  Have you any to add? Do leave them or any questions you may have in the comment box.

Image: Quick Meme

Pinterest: SEO Benefits of Naming Photographs

You have probably heard of the SEO benefits of naming your photographs properly for your blog or website. With the increased use of Pinterest, it makes even more sense to name your photographs effectively.

If you hover your mouse over a photograph, the name of the photograph appears.  All too often, the name of the photograph is something like 04578373.jpg or IMG9873.jpg.  Google cannot read images, hence each one of your pictures should have a name that includes your keyword.  For example, If you wish to sell your recipe book, your photograph of brown bread should be named brown bread recipe. Every photograph should have a relevant name and yes, it does take time to rename them.

It is also a good idea to name the photograph in the title and ‘alt tag’ part of uploading your photograph to your blog. (See our post on how to upload a photograph to your blog)  The Alternate Tag is the keyphrase that displays when someone hovers over the photo.

There are now other benefits to naming your photographs properly. More and more people are using pinterest, they are either pinning photographs by having the ‘pin it’ button on the top of their screen or they can use the ‘pin it’ button on your blog post if you have installed a plugin (see my ‘pin it’ button at the top of each Garrendenny Lane blog post).

When they pin your photograph, the name you gave that photograph in your Alt Tag will show up in the description for the pin – this means that unless the pinner changes it, your keyword within your description will remain with the photograph. If you have used a well optimised keyword, it should show up in searches and receive repins and hence, drive more traffic back to your website.

If the pinner has their account linked to twitter or chooses to tweet the pin, that description will also be tweeted with the link.  I’ve noticed that most people tend to leave the description, adding their own opinion to it such as ‘Love this’ or ‘ perfect for my child’s bedroom’ etc.

Remember that the description doesn’t just have to be factual, it can be a compelling description too.

We are planning to teach various courses on pinterest in the autumn so do let us know if you’d be interested and we’ll post up the details once we have the dates.  I will be presenting on the topic of pinterest at our next KLCK bloggers network meeting in Kilkenny on 9th July if you would like to come along.

Find It Friday: Pinterest

For this week’s Find It Friday post, we were asked a question about pinterest from Racquele:  Should I set up a specific board for each of my Pinterest categories (e.g. ‘My tutorials’ and ‘My Fabric Boxes’).  Am I being dishonest if I pin my products amongst other pictures in more general boards as people wouldn’t know some of the items are mine?

Pinterest Boards

Tips For Your Pinterest Boards

1. Try to ensure that each board name contains a popular keyword that people may search for. For example, ‘my fabric boxes’ is fine as other pinners may be looking for ‘fabric’, ‘boxes’, or ‘fabric boxes’ and your board and pins should then show up in searches.  ‘My tutorials’ is too vague – you need to explain what the tutorials are about e.g. ‘My  Sewing Tutorials’. ‘Sewing’ may also be a popular search term which would lead to your products being found and repinned.
2. Set up as many boards as are appropriate but ensure that you have a number of pins in each one. Don’t have boards that are empty.
3. See if some of the most popular board names would fit your boards. For example, according to the infographic we posted yesterday, two of the most popular board names are ‘For the Home’ and ‘Products I Love’.
4. Remember to re-arrange your boards for variety and don’t forget to move those out-of-season boards to the bottom of the page. See ‘How to Re-arrange your Pinterest Boards‘.
5. Pinterest has many benefits for your business from increasing brand awareness to significant SEO advantages.  With many people spending more time on Pinterest than any of the other social media platforms, it is certainly worth spending time on getting it right and maximising the benefits for your business.  Pinterest traffic to my online shop surpassed that of Facebook for the first time this month – time will tell if sales from Pinterest surpass those from Facebook.

Are you being dishonest by mixing your own products with others?

Not at all.  You can make it clear that the products are yours by describing them as such in the descriptor or by putting them in boards with an appropriate title, e.g. ‘My Craft Ideas’.  For example, on my pinterest account, I have a board that is named ‘Garrendenny Lane Products’ and it is evident they are products from my online shop.  I also have a board named ‘Wallpapers I Love’ and these are a mixture between wallpapers I stock and others I like. However, I think it is evident from my collection of boards that I have two businesses and my total of 59 boards reflect my products, my services as well as other areas of my life and my interests.

True pinners pin products they like as well as their own products but you are not being dishonest by mixing them up.  What is ‘bad pinterest practice‘ is pinning only your own products and it is very unlikely that you will get many repins or followers as a result unless you are already a hugely successful brand.

Pinning is about sharing and as long as you remember that, you won’t go wrong.

Would you like to attend a course on pinterest?

We will be putting in tenders to teach courses on pinterest and are hoping to gauge interest for same by posting a poll on our facebook page. We are also wondering if people would be interested in attending a webinar taught by Marie and I. We’d really appreciate if you could answer the questions on our poll or leave any comments in the box below.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend and that the sun shines 🙂

Lorna