Tips for Using Pinterest (The Most Underrated Platform)
Pinterest is the most underrated social media platform and has so much potential to give your business a boost without too much extra effort! Pinterest is essentially just another huge search engine (like Google) with an emphasis on aesthetics and every link comes with a photo or video. It’s like Google, but specifically for creators. Amazing!
You can Pin your Instagram posts, TikToks, YouTube videos, blog posts, merch, digital products — literally anything online to which you want to direct traffic, you can use Pinterest to send people there. Here are some tips for optimizing your Pinterest strategy to see more traffic on your links.
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is the most important thing you can do to boost your Pins (and your YouTube videos & blog posts). Click here for an entire post on how to do SEO properly. This will make a massive difference in your views and will also help give you longevity so that your Pins continue to circulate (and your other platforms continue to get clicks from those pins) long after you initially shared them. Do not skip this step! It’s tedious but changes everything.
2. rich pins
Rich pins really only matter if you’re promoting a website or blog (it will not work for pins directing to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok etc), but they are an amazing tool to automate some SEO and level up your pins to stand out more and look “official.” It allows you to display more information than just a title & description, and it means that when anyone else saves pins from your website, it will automatically display the title, description that you entered in the SEO on your website, instead of leaving it up to the Pinner to add their own description. It gives you a little control to make sure pins from your site are always set up to be high performing and will more likely stay linked back to you instead of becoming random unlinked images on Pinterest that don’t really give you credit at all. If you share recipes or DIYs, it’s also a great way to display the instructions/ingredients right there on the pin, making it more likely to get saved.
In order to set up rich pins, you have to first claim your website:
On Pinterest, go to Settings > Claim, click Claim under Websites and copy the HTML code.
Go to blog and paste that code in your blog header. If you use Squarespace, you’ll go to Blog > Settings > Advanced > Header Code Injection, and paste the code there!
Once you’ve claimed your site (it may take a while to get it all confirmed), copy and paste the link from one of your blog posts into the Pinterest Validator (you’ll only have to do this once).
Once that’s all set, anything that is pinned from your site should now be a rich pin!
3. formatting
You can play around with lots of different ways to format pins and see what works best for you. The one pretty universal strategy is that tall, vertical images tend to perform better, because they are larger on the screen (keep this in mind when choosing images for your blog posts). Canva is a great, free tool to use for easy Pinterest graphics if you want to make your images taller or play around with text showing the title of your post or remake a vertical version of your YouTube thumbnail. You can also just pin photos alone and see how they do! Simple photos are great for pinning from Instagram. It’s ok to create multiple types of pins for the same link to try to reach a broader audience. Try saving one photo from your website directly to Pinterest, and then creating another one in a different format and linking it back to the post, so you have 2 pins in different styles. Feel free to experiment and see which pins go viral.
4. use Pinterest’s new tools
Pinterest is always adding new tools just like other social platforms and they love it when you use them. Idea pins are big right now — basically Pinterest’s version of IG Stories, and Video pins are big right now. Anything that you post as a Reel or TikTok, you can upload directly as a Video pin as well and link it to your TikTok.
5. Stay Active on Pinterest
Don’t forget to pin other things too and mix your created pins in with other inspo. Your pins should be spread across all your boards authentically (don’t make a board for “Recent Blog Posts”), and it will help to keep saving pins from other creators. A nice perk of Pinterest is people are following you for your curation skills, not just creation! So you can grow a following just by re-Pinning other people’s work. Also, brands still love to work with Pinterest influencers because they understand the longevity value of having a link circulate for years and years (much more ROI than a one-time Instagram post), so its a great unique platform to grow on!