I’ve only recently started experimenting with my Pinterest account. I used Pinterest for several campaigns for my clients, but I’ve only recently started to really experiment with my own account.
There are three important factors when planning and executing a Pinterest strategy. Choosing the right boards (By that I mean topic + copywriting), pinning the right content and engaging.
This is what I did so far and how it worked out:
For Pinterest, I chose 4 pillars of content type:
1. Resources
2. Personal marketing
3. Character showing’ boards
4. Values
My strategy so far and how it’s going to change
A breakdown of boards for each pillar:
‘Resources’ is portrayed by 3 boards: ‘Social Media Infographics‘, ‘Mobile marketing infographics‘ and ‘Marketing Resources‘. The first two contain Stats and tips about Social and mobile, while the third board deals with more general marketing issues.
I’ve tried adding / repining about 3 to 5 pins a day, for each board for one month. The result was an increase of about 260% in followers (the average for the 3 boards). It’s not much since we’re talking small numbers (from about 30 to 80). What it did get me was invitations to post on 6 related boards, which is great ‘thought leadership-wise’ which was my main focus for this experiment.
‘Personal Marketing’ boards included only two boards ‘The After Hours‘ ‘The Music’. The first board gathered images from each of my blog posts and ‘the music’ gathered musical reference I mentioned in my blog posts (trying to add the personal touch). Neither of these boards went viral or became a ‘lead generating’ gold mine. Then again, I didn’t put any emphasize on creating very engaging or impressive content for it. I’ll talk about it in greater detail more in the next paragraphs.
RIP ‘The music’ board
The third kind, The ‘Character Showing’ boards were very fun for me, and did give great insight for people connecting with meonline, but I didn’t get a good ‘vantage point’ from it. This category held boards such as ‘workspaces‘, ‘quotes’, ‘The people. The lives‘ and ‘Apps I love‘. I didn’t post regularly to neither of them and they didn’t have much of an added value except for giving a wider understanding on who I am..
‘Values’ was a mixture of boards that I think represent my interest and personal insights I bring to my projects. Boards such as ‘Designing Tech‘ or ‘Books that inspire‘ and so on. Again, they didn’t do much and I didn’t push much about them. So it’s a 50-50 blame.
What I’ve learnt from that short one-month experiment is that when I emphasize work on certain boards – It works great. If you don’t maintain your boards, you won’t do so well. The second lesson learnt, by talking to people, is that my strategy wasn’t clear enough to the casual observer. While the marketing part was crystal clear, the rest of the boards seemed like a mish mash.
Re-adjusting the strategy and what’s coming next
Come on, a one month experiment isn’t enough to really understand the value of Pinterest for my marketing efforts. But it is enough time for me to re-adjust my strategy and focus myself on what’s working and what’s not and basically focus much more on the 20% that generates 80% of my Pinterest traffic.
Super – focus on what’s working – ‘Social Media Infographic’ is by far my most popular and prolific board. It helps me generate thought leadership and gets me invited to more related board. To empower this topic even more, I’m breaking down this board in the already existing ‘SM infographic’ board and specific social-network-based boards (Such as Twitter marketing, Pinterest marketing, Linkedin marketing and Facebook marketing). Both mobile and the marketing resources will stay the same. What I will do though, will be figuring out how to better use my updates and posting on this board to generate engagement and conversation and not just ‘repining’. I need to leverage these boards or they’ll be useless.
Social Media boards work best
Stop doing what isn’t working for me - Admittedly, a lot of what’s not working are topics I’m very fond of, and as a personal brand I allow myself to let my character show a bit more that I would usually recommend. That doesn’t mean I can keep posting stuff that doesn’t work. Meaning, the quotes will focus more on Entrepreneurship, tech, leadership, well-being, marketing and design. But still, I’ll keep the quotes for the inspirational books and people boards, I’ll give them a last chance. I’m going to try maintain them better for the next 30 days and see where it gets me. It’s mainly for my pleasure but will see how this turns out. For the ‘The music’ board, aiming to help me promote the blog, it’s dead and deleted.
Re-adjust my marketing efforts – It’s all nice and fun, but if Pinterest won’t generate me any readers (or leads later on) I have no reason to maintain it either than for pure fun which is cool but wasn’t the original purpose. This means I have to re-adjust the boards that drive traffic to my blog and maybe post better photos to each post. As I said before – ‘The music’ board will have to go and ‘The After Hours’ board will get renamed and get better pin names and descriptions.
For the next 60 days, I’ll do the modification which I’ve mentioned in this post and try to add or repin about 10 pins a day.
If you want to further check out my Pinterest boards and see how it’s going, just click pinterest.com/roypovarchik and you’ll get there.
Have any interesting boards you think I need to know about or get inspired by? Please post them on the comments section, give me a shout out on twitter or email me.
Are you on Pinterest? Feel free re-pin this post:
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