This month for our Bloggers Gonna Blog series I wanted to talk about Pinterest. Pinterest can be a bit difficult in my opinion and Melissa and I still hunt to refine our Pinterest board as well as our Pinterest strategy still but wanted to share with y’all how to curate a Pinterest board that will resonate with your followers and keep them coming back for more!
1. Identify boards you love
So gather up some inspiration from competitors, brands, and just any board that catches your attention. Make note of why you love that board and what keeps you coming back there for more or grabs your attention so that you stay on that board for a long time. For us, we love boards that tell a story and paints an entire picture. Everything from the landscape, details of textures and fabrics, colors, people and moments. Some boards that we really love are from Free People’s Holiday Magic , Anthropologie’s Away We Go and Urban Outfitters Endless Summer . All these boards feel inspirational, magical and don’t make me feel like I’m looking at an ad. While going through this process, recognize themes in color schemes, frequency of photos with and without faces as well as frequency of close up photos and far away photos. Try to find a pattern in the reason for why you like these boards because it will help you to better recreate the “feel” of the board when you apply it to your theme!
2. Decide on a vision or theme for the board
Before I even start pinning, I start to have a vision of what I want our board to look like. One of the more recent ones that I put together for Seek Wander Share was our Wander to the Desert board. I wanted people who visited the board to feel like they went on this road trip with us into the desert where we explored all sorts of aspects of a desert landscape with friends and that the entire adventure was carefree, full of color and sort of like a very hot summer night that moves so slowly it might never end. For this board the theme was obviously a desert adventure but soooo much more than that. If at all possible, and highly encourage this, pick a vision or theme with which you can contribute ORIGINAL photos. Sometimes this isn’t possible and that ok too, but original photos help to tell your UNIQUE story and can provide back links to your blog!
3. Open up about 5 tabs in your internet browser
OK! So you’ve identified what you like in Pinterest boards and have a few that you would like to emulate. You’ve also come up with a clear idea/theme/vision for what you want to communicate with your Pinners. Now, open up several tabs in your browser (I usually do about 5 or 6 but you’ll start to know how many you need here in a moment). One will be your board that your making! This needs to be in a tab because as you pin and build your board you’ll need to go back and refresh your board to see how your build is going. It’s kind of like painting a really big mural. Every now and then you’ll need to step back from the individual tabs to see how the ENTIRE mural is coming along. Now, for the rest of the tabs, all those reasons for which you loved a board that you identified in step 1 will fill these tabs. SO, for example, I love boards for mixtures of landscape type photos (far away photos), people moments that make me want to be them, texture, color and movement (this could be dancing, bike riding, sailing, walking, running really any movement that would fit in your theme). This means one of your tabs might be searching either google or pinterest for “desert sun setting” which would be for my landscape photos. Another tab might be for searching for “desert cactus flowers” for color photos, another searching for “desert girls dancing” or “desert girls riding horse” for movement photos and etc.
4. Alternate pinning
This is what I would consider the most IMPORTANT step! Now that you have tabs open with images from your search results that create a FULL story of your theme or vision for your Pinterest board, you can start ALTERNATING pinning from each tab. Once I started doing this in our Pinterest boards I saw an uptick in our Pinterest analytics that more people were viewing our boards daily and monthly and I truly believe it’s because I was putting a lot more thought into creating a more comprehensive story in our Pinterest boards. Take turns clicking on each tab and pinning from each tab and consistently CHECK YOUR BOARD TAB! If you forget to check your board tab and get stuck on a landscape tab, you could suddenly have a section of your board that makes it look like you got lost all alone out in the desert without any friends at all! So remember to check back you tab with the board your building and ask yourself am I emulating the kind of board I would want to view? Is it balanced? Does it tell the story I wanted to tell? Is it inspiring? ALSO, make sure you have pinned enough to really tell a full story. So often I check out Pinterest boards and people have a BUNCH of boards but only like 15 images on each. They would have been better off creating a full and engaging story in ONE board as I’ve described here than creating 20 boards that aren’t compelling at all.
5. Continuously update the board periodically!!
This is the easiest but most forgotten part of making the perfect Pinterest board. After initially creating the board, you can’t just wipe your hands and say “Ok! That’s a wrap folks!”. If you were thoughtful about your board’s vision, it’s most likely not a one hit wonder. People will continue to be looking for related pins next week, next month and next month! So in order to stay relevant and encourage repeat visitors as well as blog traffic (UH YES PLEASE), continue to update your Pinterest board on a regular basis so that the story of Wander to the Desert continues to engage pinners. Find a schedule of regularity that works for you. I try to update our Pinterest boards every 1.5 to 2 weeks depending on how busy I am with other blog related tasks. But honestly y’all it should take too much time, it can be as simple as pinning 5-10 additional images every few weeks.
I hope y’all found this helpful! Like I said, I’m no Pinterest expert and continue to learn new tips and tricks everyday but really felt this approach would be helpful for any bloggers out there who struggle to build Pinterest boards they love! Once I started to form this process, boards became much easier for me to build but more importantly actually started to reflect the vision I had in my mind. If you have any tips and tricks that you utilize PLEASE SHARE THEM! Melissa and I love learning new helpful information from our fellow bloggers!
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