I see lots of bloggers running contests that require you to pin a certain image or follow a certain Pinterest account. Did you know these kinds of contests are often again Pinterest rules? If you ignore the rules, they could shut you down!
For a long time, Pinterest kind just sat back and watched contests happen. They didn’t really address contests in their TOS, nor did they vocalize their thoughts on contents on their website. But that’s a thing of the past. Pinterest recently released a list of “dos” and “don’ts” when it comes to running a content on Pinterest as part of their brand guidelines.
The do list is mostly common sense, but the don’t list is something you need to understand. Here are the things you are not allowed to do, according to Pinterest:
Those of us who use Pinterest daily have been waiting for this for a long time: Pinterest is finally allowing users to create private boards! Woo hoo!
Called secret boards, all you have to do to create one is log into Pinterest and then go to your profile (your list of boards). If it’s the first time you’ve logged in since they introduced the secret board feature, the page will automatically scroll to the bottom so you can start a secret board.
Right now, this feature is still in beta, so everyone gets three secret boards. That’s it. So use them wisely! In the future, they’ll probably allow you to make more secret boards, but until then you’re limited to three.
Pinning is more fun when you’re following lots of other people. Once you’ve followed all of your friends in real life, though, how can you find other interesting people to follow? Here are a few quick tips:
Remember, you can follow individual boards if a person doesn’t seem super interesting to you beyond one or two boards. However, if you like several of their boards, I recommend following their entire profile and then unfollowing any boards that aren’t relevant to you. That way, you’ll see new boards they develop as well, which can help you find cool stuff to repin in the future.
Pinterest is all about having awesome images. If your blog is in a super visual niche, like food or travel, pictures really are worth 1,000 words. A mouth-watering cupcake or a breathtaking landscape will get tons of repins without and added text.
But what if you don’t work in a visual niche? What if you’re writing about social media or marketing or another topic that doesn’t lend itself well to breath-taking pinable pictures?
One option you have is to add text to your images, as we do from time to time here on The PinterTest Kitchen. Recently on the NMX/BlogWorld blog, I posted an excerpt from my Pinterest ebook about how to use text to instantly create pinable pictures. Today, I wanted to go a little more in-depth about how to actually go about adding text to an image.
If you’re selling items via Etsy or another online store, you can really reap the benefits. Did you know that according to a Shopify study, Pinterest users are more likely to make a purchase based on what they see on this social network – and when they do, they spend, on average, twice as much as buyers from Facebook and Twitter?
Those are some pretty good numbers, right?
One of the ways you can really increase your exposure for items on Pinterest is to get listed in the gifts category. This section of Pinterest is separated by price, making it easier for shoppers to narrow down the selection.
So how do you get your pins to show up in this area of the site? Easy – just include a price.
One of the questions I most commonly get asked about Pinterest is this:
Allison, no one is repinning my stuff. No one even knows I exist. How do I get people to follow me when I’m starting from zero?
For me, the tipping point seems to be 100. I’ve been working on my own Pinterest account for a few months, and it felt like it took forever to get to that first 100 followers. The same thing happened when I began helping with the New Media Expo account (formerly BlogWorld), and I’m going through it right now again, as I just began managing the TBEX account.
Once you get to about 100 followers, though, your account starts to gain momentum. Now, almost everything I post gets repinned, and beyond that, I get new followers every day, even if there’s a gap in my Pinterest activity. It’s getting that first 100 or so followers that takes the real work.
So how do you do it? Here are three of my best tips.
Repinning others’ content is one of the best ways to meet new people and find cool pins on Pinterest. However, if you aren’t careful, repinning can bite you in the butt. Some people are pinning improperly or with less than pure intentions, and if you repinning these pins, you’re passing on bad links to your followers
This problem stems from the ability to edit a pin’s URL. Once you pin an image (or upload an image as an original pin), you can click “edit” and change the URL to be whatever you want.It can be a good tool when you want to pin something but there’s no image on the page.
People are unfortunately taking advantage of this. They’ll pin a really cool image of something totally unrelated to their site (that isn’t even their content in most cases) and then point to their own homepage. Sometimes, the URL where they point even contains misleading information or viruses. Essentially, they’re hijacking pins to promote their own sites.
Pinterest is getting better at alerting you to these problems, but it’s still possible for pins to link to less-than-savory sites.
A really cool image is bound to be repinned dozens or even hundreds or thousands of times, which means the misleading information is getting passed on and on and on unless someone changes it. Unfortunately, most people pin images without checking where the link leads until much later, when they want to use the recipe or make the craft project. So the bad links just keep getting passed on.
Be a responsible repinner – always click through to see where a pin leads before you repin it. If the pin does not lead to the original creator’s content, the source of the image itself, don’t repin.
Usually, when a pin’s link is misleading, there’s a real version of the pin out there. You can simply search for it using Pinterest’s search function and repin it from a good source.
If that doesn’t work, you can use Google to track down where the pin’s image is original posted. Google has provided a great tutorial on how to search by image if you don’t already know how. Basically, just save the image to your computer, upload it to Google’s image search and voila! It will show you the places online where this image is found. You can find the source to pin this way, rather than repinning the same image that has been hijacked to point to another link.
The bottom line? Check potential repins before you pin. That way, you can be rest assured that you’re always passing on the best content possible to your followers.
Did you know that you can tag your friends in the description of a pin, which will notify them that they’ve been tagged? It’s quite handy when you pin something they’ve created or you want to alert them about a pin that they should see. If your friend follows a lot of people, they might otherwise never see your pin in their stream.
If you use Twitter or Facebook, the tagging process should seem familiar to you. All you have to do is type the @ symbol and then start typing the person’s name. Pinterest will create a drop-down list of people the same way Facebook does, and you can select the correct person from the list. Then just type the rest of the description as you normally would.
In order to tag someone, you have to be following at least one of their boards. In the past, the rule was that they had to be following at least one of your boards, which prevented people from spamming popular pinners. I would not be surprised if they someday chance this rule back, but for now, as long as you are following, you can tag.
A few tagging etiquette tips:
Tag away, dear readers! Many of you may already know about this feature, but I hope those of you who didn’t realize you could tag start using this option at least occasionally to help you stay connected with friends.
