Lessons
Lesson Info
Branding on Pinterest
If you have a strong brand you know, maybe write down on a piece of paper adjectives about your brand. My brand is modern. My brand is clean, or my brand is masculine. Or my brand is feminine. You know just write that down, and then try to think about what are things that are associated with that from an aesthetic standpoint. So is that hopefully in your branding it's beyond maybe black and white and there's additional colors in there. If it's really graphic and bright yellows, bright blues, maybe a lot of the content that you pin on Pinterest would be falling in line with that. Just be mindful to be curator so that you represent your brand well. So I know this is a lot, some slides I go one by one. And some I'm just going to put all up there so you can read it as I go. Ultimately you want to aim to showcase the lifestyle of your brand. So think about your brand as a person. Maybe it's easier to do that when you're just the sole business owner, but if you have multiple employees try to...
envision the persona of your brand. What do you where when you travel? What do you like to eat? Think about the lifestyle. Everybody eats, everybody gets dressed every day. I think it's totally appropriate even though if you don't sell clothes to have a board that is about fashion because that creates a connection point with your customer. Your customer gets dressed every day too. What do they like? Maybe you first start talking and connecting over clothes and then they realize oh you sell pottery, very cool. I want to learn more about that. Add a profile picture that is consistent with other platforms. You know if you have a profile on Instagram, make sure that you're using the same image so that you know that creates continuity and familiarity. In your bio you want to tell pinners who you are and what you like to do. Take an opportunity to express some personality. Are you really fun, are you more serious? You want about 35 boards or so. So sometimes when I say this, it kind of freaks people out because maybe you've been on Pinterest for a really long time and you're like oh my gosh, I have like 150 boards. What am I going to do? Not to worry, Pinterest has a new archive feature where you can archive boards now, instead of deleting boards. Because when you delete boards you can potentially be deleting followers. So you can archive your boards. You can also consolidate and move boards, nest boards underneath each other. Pinterest now has that new capability where you can have an over arching beam like recipes to try, and within that you can have secondary boards that's all about pasta or dessert or drinks. So take time to organize that and try to create about 35 boards or so on your profile. And what I was talking to you about sections, that's Pinterest's word for secondary boards and sub-boards so Pinterest calls them sections. And those can focus on the specific themes. And I like to, this is personal preference, not something that's said by Pinterest, but personally I like to put my more engaged boards at the top of my profile. And you can learn about which boards are most engaged with by going and looking at your Pinterest insights and seeing which boards people are active on. And the reason why I do that is mostly because if people in my community are already loving this content, chances are new followers are going to love it too. So I give them that opportunity right at the top to see, oh hey, you're probably are really going to like this recipe board. You also want to make sure that you are being a curator, like I said, with every pin within the community. You're pinning a pin that you're passionate about or that you actually enjoy. Don't just pin to pin. Don't just spam people. That's spammy behavior to just try to populate things that you actually could care less about. And you want to make sure you're categorizing your boards, so every time you create a new board there's an option to choose the category. So maybe it's home decor or women's fashion or men's fashion. By doing that, it signals to Pinterest, hey this board is about this, so when people are searching men's fashion, maybe we're going to recommend this board. So you want to give yourself the best chance to be recommended. And follow people. Don't be that person that just wants a bunch of followers and doesn't engage in the community and follow anybody else. And also you're missing out on the whole experience of Pinterest by not following people. You want to be served great ideas, you want that coming into your feed so take time to find cool people in your community and connect with them. So this is my brand as an example. It's AVE Styles. You can tell that I have soft colors, pastels, very natural, neutral. It's modern, and this is my Pinterest account, so these are my boards. You can tell I've taken my brand and implemented it within my boards and created a lifestyle experience there. You can see my favorites, my hair and makeup, my food, my outdoor inspiration, holiday, everything that I do as my lifestyle, but is also branded in a way where you can really experience my style, my personal style. And probably how I'm dressed today too. So that is in essence how you would brand yourself on Pinterest. Does anyone have any questions about that? The look that you had on your board just now is very cohesive and stuff, so can you choose those top three photos for each board that goes on like the cover of it? Yeah, yeah, Pinterest... Okay, I'm sure you'll get to that, but yeah, I was just wondering. Yeah, Pinterest has the option where you can choose cover images to represent your boards. Cool, thank you. Yeah, so that's how you can create a better experience. So take time to do that and organize that. Does anyone else? Okay so my question for you is I see a lot of people they either brand themselves on Pinterest with their name versus their business name. What are your thoughts on that as far, or should you have two different accounts? That's a great question. I would say your business name, especially if you're creating a business account and you're using it for business purposes. I would go with your business name. I made a mistake and I branded under myself, and you can go back and change that at any time. I haven't done that just because it's been linked to a lot and those links would break. But I wish I had done it under my business, yeah, personally. If you already have a personal Pinterest, do I create a separate business account from there? Is it better to start clean or to continue it over, what would you recommend? You can transition to a business account. I would say a business account is great for the reasons of getting those insights and analytics and the ability to run ads, so you're missing out on a lot by not having a business account and then transitioning that into your business if you would like. You're not going to miss out on anyone. If you want to run two separate accounts, that's your prerogative, but at the same time if you're worried about pinning personal things or you know you're like I really want to start working out and I wanted to save those workout ideas, but I don't want anyone to know, you can just pin those in the secret board section of your business account too. So that's what I do personally. But if you also have a lot of people managing, like say you have a lot of people logging in and populating your Pinterest account within your office, maybe a personal account would be good to have as well. I just have a quick question. So with your account here, there's quite a few pins in each board. Are they a combination of your self curated material and other people's? Yes, so I will get to that in a little bit about how to share content, but absolutely. I create general categories so that I can pin a lot of content to them. It's a lot easier for me to say, keep the boards engaged and up to date, so that's why recipes to try is a general idea instead of just having a board all about apple pie. I probably would hardly ever populate that board. And then as far as being recommended, boards being recommended, Pinterest isn't going to be likely to recommend that board because that's not going to create a good user experience for their audience. And so you'll see that there's a ton of pins within each board, mostly because they're these general categories. And then I make sure to have a branded board that's all about my business, so that people can experience my business on Pinterest. But then I also re-pin or save those same pins again to another relevant board. So say it's this outfit right here, I would save it to AVE Styles and then I would also save that same image again to spring fashion. Awesome, we're going to keep moving forward. Oh, do you, one more question? I have a really quick question. Yeah. It's sort of adds on to that. If you're re-saving things, do you change the comments? Like do you make a point, you're probably getting to that, but it's something that I never bother changing the comments and I never really look at them, so I don't know what other people have said. That's a great question. Yes, absolutely, take an opportunity to change the description of the pin because when you first share that pin it has those key terms in it and you know Pinterest is like a search tool, right, so you're only offering those search terms within that pin and then by saving it again, you have a whole new opportunity to reach a whole new audience with new terms. And so you want to take as many opportunities as possible, and that's what's awesome about Pinterest is you can recycle content. It's not spamming behavior or bad, it's the fact that you know that this pin can help several different people in different stages of life and you want to make sure you're reaching all of them. And it's kind of weird to try to just shove it all into one pin and hope for the best. Not to mention, people can follow individual boards, so if I say follow your winter fashion board, but I don't follow your spring fashion board, I, you know, would be missing out on some things. You know, so you're giving people more opportunities to experience your content.
Ratings and Reviews
Crystal Cervantes
This class was awesome! I have never really thought about how to use Pinterst to help build my brand. The only thing I wish she would touch on is how to collaborate and communicate to reach other Pinterest influencers.
Joshua Proto
Amazing! I had never thought of Pinterest as a meaningful ad platform, but I was super wrong! If one has a physical product or market in the lifestyle or fashion sectors they need to seriously consider this platform. Alexandra is easy to understand and presents her information in an engaging and thorough style. She truly is a Pinterest master!