Tips for Growing Your Pinterest
For me, Pinterest was always something that I did for fun before we even had Weekend Creative. I was that typical girl pinning recipes and wedding ideas and DIY instructions, filling up boards with things I would probably never actually use. When we started our business, I started using Pinterest mostly for shoot inspiration (although that has now changed for the most part) and I never really thought of it as a place to look for clients.
As our account began to grow, I noticed that more and more people were mentioning that they found us on Pinterest and I began to realize that it could be a place for us to start marketing ourselves. Not only that, but Pinterest became the #1 driver of traffic to our site which helped to boost our SEO. This helps us to rank higher in google searches, further increasing our changes of being found by clients.
When you think about it, many of the people who end up hiring product photographers are on Pinterest looking for inspiration just as I was. When they see images that they like, they will often click through to see who the creator was, and if it links back to your site, they just might reach out to you! Pinterest is a search engine, so by using the right key words, you can help your work reach more of the companies you want to be working for.
Here's a few tips and tricks that we've used to grow our following and attract more clients:
Set Up a Business Account and Claim Your Website
If you're using Pinterest to market your business, you'll definitely want to make a business account and then claim the URL to your website. What this does is tell Pinterest that anything that is pinned from your site belongs to you - even if you aren't the one who pinned it. It also helps to increase your engagement when you do pin from your site. According to Tailwind, 80% of the accounts who have higher engagement have claimed their website so this is pretty important.
Use a Scheduling App
Ideally you want to pin 6-20 times a day, but spread out throughout the day and not all at once. Since no one has time to do this every day, we recommend using a scheduler to help make this process easier. We use Tailwind and noticed a huge difference in our account traffic, follows, and engagements when we started using it consistently. You can schedule out really far in advance, and you can also add your most popular pins into a SmartLoop so they continue to be repinned and generate traffic.
Pin Fresh Content
Pinterest responds best to fresh content, meaning original content that comes from you and not something that was repinned. On average, a fresh pin will get about 20 more saves than a repin. I still repin all the time, I have the tailwind button installed into my browser so I can schedule out repins, but I also try to make sure that about 70% of our content is original and comes from our site. In order to increase the amount of content that we have, I use a combination of images and also graphics that I create for each blog post that we write.
I've also found that BTS images do really well on Pinterest, and so we set up If This Then That to pull images automatically from our IG to Pinterest when we post, and I try to regularly upload additional BTS shots. Every time we update our site with new work, I will schedule out pins, making sure to pin the images to all boards that they fit into. I then will go in every few months and schedule out a bunch of work that was posted a while ago. They key is to be constantly be creating new content but what's great is that you're already creating that content for your clients so you should always have something fresh!
Make Your Content Searchable
As I mentioned, Pinterest is a search engine so you want to make everything as searchable as possible. I recommend adding in as many keywords into your pins as you can. Also do some searches yourself to see what keywords other people are using for similar images. When you type a word like "photoshoot" into the search bar, other suggested terms will appear below. This is a great way to get ideas for other terms to include in your own pins. You can write a caption that includes as many keywords as you can fit, and then list any additional ones after the caption, like hashtags (but you don't need to use #).
Use Video and Story Pins
The newest thing on Pinterest is video and story pins (this shouldn't be a surprise haha). What this means is that any gifs you make will probably do really well. You can also quickly animate text in Adobe spark to create some fun videos for any graphics you want to pin. Story pins are like IG stories in a way, but you don't want to add any links, and you also want to add text to the images directly in Pinterest while you're creating the pin since the text will be searchable as well. We've only made one story pin so far, but it completely blew up (I'm talking 55K impressions haha) and so now I know that we definitely need to make it a priority to keep creating them.
Those are a few of my top tips to grow your Pinterest! If you want to take a look at ours to get some ideas, you can see our account here. Let me know if you have any additional questions below as I may do a second post with even more information if there is enough interest!
Is it the weekend yet?
Elle