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Growing Your Pinterest Presence

So now what we're going to do in this second segment is we're going to talk about growing your pinterest presence so you can certainly start pinning your own content your own products your own images to pinterest right away but what I found is if you can spend a little bit of time growing your pinterest presence growing you're following it's going to make that more effective so the best way to grow your pinterest audience is to pin great content and that's what we're gonna be talking about in this segment so we're not gonna be talking so much in this segment about pinning your own products and services were spent all of segment three on that but what we're doing instead here is we're creating in this context right because we know that our customers don't use our products in a vacuum it's not like tiffany's customers where her earrings and nothing else right they wear them with outfits they wear them it's mine I don't know I think he knows something about her customers that I don't know...

you know they wear them with an outfit they wear them in their homes that are decorated a certain way maybe they wear them to work where they wear them to yoga or they were going to the gym so they're wearing they're wearing them in the world your products exist in the world and so that's what we're doing on pinterest is we're creating a world and we're basically curating a lifestyle for our customers and the more you can do this and do this well, the more followers you're going to gain on pinterest and so the best way to do that is to pin great content so what constitutes great content? It's content that's interesting to your audience so here's the thing great content looks different for all of us. What I pin is gonna look different than one tiffany pins and what kathy pins and what sarah pins because it's about my personal customers and my vision for the brand so its content that's interesting to your audience and its content that complements your products, right? So whatever makes sense for your products and this is gonna be different even if you're in the same product category tiffany and I both make jewelry, but we make different jewelry and we have different customers. We might have some overlap in the types of boards, but you may make jewellery that's really geared towards weddings and bridle and engagement rings, in which case the complement to your products might be a lot of wedding related content, right? If you're doing engagement rings your customers even if the boyfriend hasn't bought one yet she's probably got that someday wedding board right she's starting to think about the wedding that's probably how he knows like hit hand honey look at those pincher sports right so you're going to kind of create that world around that and that content should also match your brands aesthetic so it should really clearly look like you and it should also match your brands purpose so my brand is all about strong, confident women so I try to pin that kind of content on pinterest you know, whether it's women from history that inspire me or I'm just making sure that when I'm pinning images might not like the wallflower girls like kind of hang back where it's like hey here I am like, I got that like, you know, that's the kind of women that I want a pin even in things like my fashion and style boards and then just from a practical point of view, great content always means high quality, vertically oriented images the way pinter's has set up a vertical always wins verticals where you see it really nicely horizontal images were like this big and they're really hard to see and we don't like that, right? So when those beautiful vertical images not to vertical, if we go to tall pinterest actually cuts the image off so we kind of hit that sweet spot but more important than all of that is, of course the of interest to your audience compliments your products, matches your brands aesthetic and highlights your purpose so who is your audience? It's on pinterest your audience is the ideal customer for your products or services it's a simple is that it's not your peers it's not your friends and family it's your ideal customer now this may be familiar to some of you if you were in either of my other workshops we've talked about this but we talked about it pretty extensively and selling your products to retailers you want to actually create really distinct customer profiles so when I think about my ideal customers I don't think that oh it's women twenty two seventy who live in sort of like the east coast or the west coast or maybe chicago and there in the suburbs of the city ish that's not what I think about think about susan susan's a forty four year old interior designer she lives in a boston suburb she's stylish I would say she's stylish but not a fashion trendy right she's probably just just like our entire city audience she's probably wearing like great knee high boots right now. Uh well it's boston so she might be stumbling show shoveling snow I'm not really sure but she's got, you know she's pretty stylish so think about susan and I know that susan is looking for great interiors on pinterest right and I think about bernice and bernice is my sixty three year old hip grandma she's got the great gray bob and the red square glasses and she's traveling and she's interested in art and culture and annie I think of annie she's, my thirty two year old professional. She lives in d c she's constantly thinking about what she has to wear to work right she's always trying to look good at work. She wants to present herself sexually single so she's trying to think about the things she can wear to work that still look good when she goes out. Afterwards, I think about bt my thirty seven year old entrepreneur living in chicago who spends most of her day in her yoga clothes but then also needs to find something great to wear when she goes to a conference or speaking about these are real people. I made him up just so we're clear wait have a ton of time to get a customer profiles these are people that I imagine to be my customers over the years I've gotten some pretty good confirmation and one of our last workshop someone said she actually spotted bernie's, she spotted bernice out of dinner, so bernice does exist and bernice wasn't just go so yeah, I hit that one right there. Uh but you know, they're made up there, they're based on people that I that I know about, so you think about this for your customers? Well, think about who might be looking for your products and using this and imagining this let's uh start to answer some of these questions and think about the content that they're looking for on pinterest so what air their interests no susan's interested obviously in interiors yes it's her job but it's your job because she's passionate about and she loves it right so she's looking at that kind of stuff on pinterest no bernie's is interested in art and travel what are they dreaming about? No are they thinking about whether it's a big vacation or maybe it's just the chance to have dinner with their husband without the kids around right? What are they dreaming about what are they searching for online and that might very specifically be pinterest pinterest is more and more becoming a site or people are going in and searching for product so what are they searching for? What problems do they have problems don't have to be major problems could literally be what do I wear with boyfriend jeans that's a problem right and then what other brands are they looking at are interested in right this is actually really useful information what other brands are they following that's going to actually really help us find great content and sort of find our ideal customers on pinterest so tiffany what brands do you think your customers falling interest on I want our online audience to share too um I you know I've done all this work I um what I'm thinking and thinking like sort of blah g sort of the things that are coming to mine because I'm kind of rethinking things look now they follow like any clothing retailers are they following definitely but I think they're following more smaller booty okay and local local so that filing like they're local boutique on their local yoga studio and yeah, I find that actually where I'm living now is where my customer is living I'm getting a lot of that and having my warehouse space and having people coming into my studio and finding that they're following a lot of the local art scene uh okay so yes so they're looking for kind of art and the locals your husband is very local focused for sure yeah awesome what brand are your customers falling on pinterest I want to say I think maybe interior things okay? I no um like I would maybe even anthropology anything chan your little did norman anthropology here I'm your customer might be falling like kate spade yeah yeah that matter aesthetic but I think for you when you called monica yeah absolutely it's true there what do you think I'm not the hugest shopper? I'm thinking maybe donna karan okay because you know it's somebody she's because I like her they will be falling like eileen fisher really? That could be a branding maybe your customers are fine not quite I don't know I don't shop maybe maybe something okay all right what we're getting online saying that her customers follow all saints they follow j crew so she's looking at this in the same thing that's an important thing to think about you know if you haven't taken the time to think about what other brands or customers following spend a little time doing that because the reality is that your customers aren't just buying your product and they're not just interested in your brand they're looking at other brands so if you can know that that's really good useful helpful information right? So before we dive into actually starting to pin and build some of the great content I want to talk about finding pinter's to follow because following the right people on pinterest makes it easier to find great content when I say the right people I mean the right people for you people for your business and your customers so you want to follow painters who curate great content that matches your aesthetic I follow a couple people that they're not you know they're not brand that's one well known but I swear it's like they they pan and I'm like yes yes yes yes yes right we want those people you want to follow brands that your customers follow that could be really useful right? So the person who said their customer you know is following all states and j crew they should also be following those because you could get a lot of useful information, you should follow a handful of your ideal customers you don't have to follow all of them, but if you find someone and you see that come across their profile and you're like yeah that's my that's my girl that's my guy if your approach it's probably a girl, we're on pinterest let's be honest, you're like yeah that's my girl follow her and then you also might wanna pin some power penner's pinup in follow some power pinter's people who are there really active, pinning a lot of content because it's going to make your life easier now there's a couple of questions that are going to come into that should you follow your peers and competitors know for the most part no, because what happens is unless you're fortunate and that they all are watching this class right now they're probably pinning content that's geared towards piers and competitors, right? So it's not going to be the kind of customer focus content that you want to see follow a couple people if they're your friends and you know that you guys are kind of pinning similar content but I'm not gonna follow fifty other jewellers it's not gonna help may the other question that comes up a lot and actually what we're talking about this we can switch over in my computer is how many people should you follow right so pinterest is not reciprocal, so it doesn't have that I follow you, you follow me back culture so you can build that following with not falling a lot of people, if we go to my profile, you khun see, no, I follow four hundred and thirty nine people, I have twenty three thousand followers, right? So there's, no sense of reciprocity there, you know you can follow. I think when I started, I probably like two hundred or so, so I bumped it up a little bit, but don't feel like you have to go crazy. You actually want to be selective about following the other thing is, if you've been following people that aren't a great fit when you're in your feed. If people are pinning things that you don't love, you can follow them or you can follow boards. Andrew has this group or that's driving me nuts unfollowed board done so if you don't like what's happening in your feed, start to strategically on follow people. It's actually gonna make your user experience on pinterest so much better remember telling some of this, and they were, like, really weird because I don't use pinterest because I don't like what comes up in my feed follow different people, unfollowed the ones you don't like, so you can see if we look at kind of who I'm following that pitcher says this weird thing now where it wants you to look at interests and I'm not following any so we look at the pictures that I'm falling there's sarah on cathy tiffany you're not at the top because I followed you before so you can see you know for the most part I'm falling a few brands but I'm also you know, I started to follow a few kind of what I would call regular people people that came in and I thought, okay, this seems like my ideal customer and what you can actually d'oh it's fine people by starting with the brands that you think your customers following so if you think that person online said they thought their customers following j crew see if I can find a crew quickly I could actually go into j crew's website and if I thought that my customers were also following j crew I might take a look at j crew's followers right? And I'm going to come in and I might decide oh, you know what I think that person they might be my ideal customer too I'm going to make some pretty split decisions here oh this person is but she's got a pins and it kind of looks like maybe she's interested in travel let's follow her for a little while I can always on follower later right so if you've been following a lot of your just your peers or your friends, try to build yourself up to at least a couple hundred people that you're following that air, doing great content, and I do one of the things I do look forward, I'm picking people to follow because I'm looking for people who are active is I'm looking for people with a decent amount of pins, I actually don't care about their follower numbers that's not important to me, I don't care that christina only has one hundred forty one followers. I care that she has four thousand pins that's useful to me. Twenty three pens that's not someone I want to follow that's not useful because they're not an active user, so when you're looking for active users and that's going to help you because they're generating more content and it makes it easier for you to find content, we're getting the questions about that online. I think people think the unfollowed thing was something they were concerned about at the beginning, but you made it very, very clear. Great. So now what I want to do is talk about the ways that people access content on pinterest and how that actually impacts your pinterest strategy, because it's important to know where people are finding content. You can see that pin dris knows that I just follow this christina person because now we're getting a ton of her pins. So the first thing that I want to point out that's really important to keep in mind is that actually three quarters of all pinterest traffic comes from mobile, so I'm showing you this on my computer because that's, the set up we have to work with, right? We have to be on the computer, but keep in mind that three quarters of people on pinterest are using it on their phone or using it on their tablet. So not everyone is seeing pinterest like this and actually the other thing, and this will come back in our when we talk about your kind of power pinning strategy is I frequently don't use pinterest on my computer, I frequently use it on my phone, it's faster, it's more efficient I could get in, I can get out, but I'm showing on the computer, so just keep that in mind. Three quarters come from mobile rang was asking three people have voted on this a swell eso because people are using mobile, is it critical to verify the design, design and layout of your profile so that it can be seen clearly on mobile devices? Pinterest optimizes all that. Yeah, so you know that's actually I think why they shorten the length of the bio you can have it so that it's a little bit more readable on mobile so thank you all right, so people are going to access content on pinterest and really three main ways the first one is through their feed and very recently pinterest rolled something out called smart feed and it freaked a lot of people out. So what used to happen on pinterest was you saw everything that your followers pinned in real time as they were kenya, so what that meant was if someone you followed decided that they wanted to pin fifty pins about the great gatsby you saw fifty pins about the great gatsby you weren't interested in the great gatsby was really annoying, right? So pinterest realized that that was driving a lot of people nuts, so what they did is they built this algorithm called the smart feed. So now what happens is you see a mixture of the pins that of people you follow but prioritized subversive all someone pins fifty pins from the great gatsby I'm not going to see them in my feet anymore. Instead, what I'm going to see is pins that are more relevant to the kind of content that I pin plus pins that pinterest has decided arm or kind of valuable what that means is pins that have more links to them pins that are better quality images and pins that have great descriptions I don't know how that magic other algorithm rhythm works, but somehow it all works what that really means for you is not that people won't see your content if you pin it there was a big panic like it's like facebook and I might have to start to pay and all of this stuff know what it means is that if you have a board and you're on ly pitting your own content to that board, people are only likely to see it if they're already if they've already said that they're interested in your content, right? But if I have a board that's about fashion and I pinned my products within that context now my pins my products are related to all of those other fashion pins which my audience has said they want to see, so it increases the likelihood that someone is going to see my pin higher up in their feet so that's one thing that you see in the smartphone then you also see let's see if we can find one, pinterest will also show you what they call related pins and watch now that we're looking for one, we won't be able to find one, but it'll usually they'll be like another little bar in here that'll say related pins that again is based on pinterest algorithm and stuff that you recently penned it's really nice because pinder says, hey I saw you repenting a bunch of accessories let me show you more that is not a paid pin paid pins do not come up in smart feed okay? So the promoted pins don't shop here the other thing that shows up in smart feed which I don't have turned on are those interests pinterest now lets you select interest so we saw if I went into that category page of home decor it gave me some selected interests so if I said I'm interested in industrial design and I follow that interest, I'm going to start to see I don't know if it'll come up right away but I might start to see just general industrial design pins in my feed without having to follow any particular person so I haven't got the sense of how much people are actually using that they may or may not be using it very actively I have it turned off I don't really follow interest because it gets a little overwhelming to me, but so that's the first way that people are accessing content is through their feet and that's the people that they follow the second way that people are accessing content on pinterest is through those category pages so they're going on to pinterest and they're saying today I'm interested in home decor and they're clicking on home decor and their browsing right and a lot of people who are just kind of average pinterest users look a pinterest this way they don't follow a ton of people if you look at the average user who's just using it for personal they might not follow a ton of people instead they're going to say I'm looking for better ideas maybe I'm gonna scroll home to corps or you know I'm not sure what I'm gonna wear today I'm gonna show women's fashion you know? I just want to look at women's fashion and I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna browse, right? So and this is where you will see promoted pins actually that's interesting for a while they took that out as an option in categories but you can see they're coming back in now for a while you could only see promoted pins and search but there clearly tweaking that a little bit, but so a lot of people are just accessing through categories and then they might come into these related interests and decide my pinterest speed's going to be crazy until this is all said and done, maybe they're really into dresses and they're going to follow dresses it's an interest right? So or they might just come in and browse some crazy stuff don't follow that you change your mind on pinterest that's the beauty right? So this is another way that they're looking and this is why it's really important that we make sure that our boards or categories now pinterest has just like everything else they have algorithms for how things show up in the categories it has to do with it's not, you know, like the old at sea search where like you pin and it came up like right away in a certain category it's it's a little bit more nuanced than that, like it's a combination of again that sort of relevance search keywords, your timing it's a whole bunch of stuff, but if your board's not categorized, you will never show up in the category feed. So we want to make sure that our boards or categories because that's the second way that people access the third way that people access and this is the way that pinterest is really, really hoping people are engaging with their site is they do it through search so they come in and they say, okay, well, let's go back to this wants to be like before they search for advanced style, right? They might also coming in search like recipe ideas, holiday party ideas, what's for dinner, whatever they're they're thinking they need, they might search right? So pinterest is really counting on this, which is why they're giving us all of this suggested search this is what they call this now, and this is the most valuable tool that you have at your disposal for coming up with board categories for writing great descriptions so even if we just search something really basic like if I just search fashion well, first of all, you could see as I started to type before we even got this far, it gave me a few suggestions right there, right? Fashion style fashion d I y fashionista fashion week fashion design so these are all things that people are searching for on pinterest, right? But then once I'm in fashion now it's going to be even more categories, right? Tell me teenage st d I y nineteen twenties so you people are using search to find the things that they're looking for on pinterest and that's why keywords become really critical when you're pinning because keywords influenced search now pinterest is really smart and if you search for something let's say we search for like everyone in our audience is wearing black boots, so we're going to search for black boots not every thing in black boots is necessarily going to have black boots and the description you can see here it's like of course, I'm in love with these boots pinchers just smart enough to figure out that somewhere else someone on the site describe these is black boots, but this pin is more popular, so they decided to put it higher it's all those crazy algorithms again but so doesn't always have to be perfectly described, but the better your description the better can be in and pinterest loves redundancy, right? So if I had a pin titled black boots on a board titled black boots that's probably gonna help that come up in search a little bit better I'm not saying you should do that black boots is a pretty narrow board category, but that's another way that people are engaging with the sight too many questions coming up about search or any of those other things yeah, too many well so my thought and this goes back to that d I y board where I could have done a home decor d I y would I rather do do I? Why are you looking for those long change search words d I y so broad that you wouldn't want to narrow it down that's a great question onboard categories you're looking for the those basic search terms ok, like a home to course what you want in a board title on your product pinar on any pin, right? You're probably going a little more long tail you're probably doing something that's a little more detail you're not going to make every pin in that board say d I y home to court, but you do want your boards to be those big, broad basic kind of category or interest type disruptions, okay get anything from online I'm not sure about this question manella kabbalah is asking is there a reason to follow individuals in a single company when you've got these broad categories so for example, we search on modern architecture you're going to see everything right that's a great question and yes, there is a reason to follow and it has to do with the aesthetics so when you follow a broad category, modern architecture might get you a kind of a specific aesthetic, but you saw when we followed dresses we got our well, you know, dresses an interest, we got some pretty crazy stuff, so I'm going even though I might want to pin dresses, I'm gonna have a better chance following bloggers and brands who pinned them in ways that match my aesthetic than just following the entire broad interest because remember, we're trying to curate a very specific vision for our brand appreciate that actually four people voted on that so thank you, alec obama on another one that five people voted on how do you figure out what the most searchable bore titles are? That's actually where you go into like your categories and look at those big, broad interests because people are searching for those really basic things more often than not, thank you awesome all right, so now let's go ahead and start to talk about the content that you should be pinning so we're going to start to die, vince. Now what I call your power pinning strategy, where were pinning content, and the trick here is that the majority of content that you pin should come from within pinterest itself. So when I'm spending time looking for content to pin, I'm not going to lots of other websites. I'm doing it all from within pinterest and that's. What keeps me really efficient, and then pretty much the only time I'm pinning content, not from within pinterest itself, is when I'm pinning my own content. So the rest of the time, I'm on here seeing what's happening, right?