Why Your Pinterest Strategy Isn’t Working

The Story of a Pinterest Board

Once upon a time in the land of social media lived a wonderful and creative small business owner. The first time she saw Pinterest with its beautiful images, she knew she had to find a way to get into that social program and meet her Pinterest Charming.

She asked the woodland creatures, “How do I use this new social network if I don’t have a pretty product or a cool gadget to sell?” They showed her some of the top Pinterest users to follow and pointed her towards several blogs that focused on how to use Pinterest for her business.

She trusted the furry wildlife as they were everywhere on Pinterest. She found them posing in pictures sitting on a couch or playing in the water.  And some even became viral memes.

How could these cute animals be wrong? { They were so fluffy! }

Onward she went on her Pinterest journey.

She followed Pinners with the big followers. She read the blogs, learned the tricks to their pinning strategy and tweaked it to fit into her own crazy busy world of a small business owner.

Follow along with me, my fans in the Pinterest kingdom, and see the steps I use to grow my Pinterest account that brings more traffic to my site than Facebook, Twitter and organic Google searches combined.

Social Media with a Strategy

As a daily user of Pinterest, it didn’t take me long to see that more people are following my content-targeted boards rather than hitting that red Follow All button. I get that because I do it too.

As you’ll learn with this post, this Pinterest behavior pattern is actually a good thing! Because when it comes to growing your presence on Pinterest, your boards are the first place you want to spend your time.

Personally, I love the idea that Pinterest allows us to follow boards that interest us. It makes the content in our home feeds focused on what we love and what we want to learn more about, read and see.

And quite honestly, I don’t know the exact algorithm about how this works but when you get enough people following your boards, your board followers get counted towards your overall follower number.

Let me share with you how this works:

My top Pinterest board is called Social Media Strategy.

At the time of this post, I have 7,000 followers who have clicked the Follow Board button. I say ‘at the time of this post’ because every week I get anywhere from 20- 30 new followers just to this particular board. This board’s followers grow on a daily basis.

So, how did I do this?

Strategy, my friends. I developed a Pinterest board strategy.

For those of you who just met me, I teach small business owners and bloggers how to manage their social media and find ways to include social marketing into their already busy schedule. { virtually shakes hand, nice to meet you! }

When it came time to create my pinboards, I wanted to do something that would show my followers who I am, what I do and how I could help them.

One of the most important things I learned as I worked on my marketing strategy was this:

View each of your pinboards as its own destination.

These are the steps I use to keep this pinboard growing:

1. Finding My Message

As you’re adding new boards or building on the ones that you already have, ask yourself these questions:

• Why would someone want to follow this board?
• What makes my board different than the other boards with the same topic?

After you come up with those answers, think about this question:

“What’s the message behind this board?”

And then spend a few minutes brainstorming some ideas about what type of content you’ll add to this board.

For my Social Media Strategy board, I stuck to the narrow focus of what I do in my business. I pin tips to help small business owners and bloggers use social media marketing.

You won’t ever see content about how to build a website or sales tips. Website stuff just isn’t my message of who I am and what I do.

The idea is to develop your boards like you’re building a resource that people will want to follow. You’re creating a place that provides your followers with the content they’re looking for to help them.

2. Content of my pins

With my message in my head, I started pinning. I wanted this pinboard to be a social media resource for solopreneurs. To get to that place, I became very selective about the information that I pinned.

I didn’t want this to turn into another board that only pinned infographics. While I dig a good infographic, how many people can say that they open an infographic when they want to learn how to develop their social media strategy?

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.

Most people will find an article or pull up a blog post they saved when they’re ready to walk through some steps. They’ll read it again and again and grab whatever nugget of information that they need from it.

I wanted my pinboard to be that place where people can go when they’re looking for information to help them with their social media marketing.

I run searches for specific social media content on Pinterest to pin on this board. And when I’m doing my research for a client, I’ll pin new content if I find an article to be pin-worthy.

3. Pinning my pins

My pins fall into one of these categories:

• Social media content that shares information to help small business owners and bloggers
• Inspirational quotes about running a business by yourself – some days you need some words to remind you why you get up every morning and turn that laptop on
• And the occasional social media humor pin – who couldn’t use a laugh to brighten their day?

If you follow me on Pinterest, you’ll notice that I never do a pindump to this board. I have certain criteria for each pin and I truly think that’s one of the reasons this board has grown faster than any of my other boards.

I look for the following things before I pin:

1. Believe or not, I read almost every article that gets pinned to that board. I click to ensure the links work and I’m not sending you to a spam page.

Plus, I want to make sure that the information is relevant and valuable to my followers. It makes no sense to pin something from 2007 that doesn’t even mention social media as a marketing tool. How will that help you?

2. I like engaging images and can tell which ones will be shared. When a pin gets shared from my board and lands in someone’s Pinterest feed, even if it’s not my content, it leads back to my pinboard.

Pinterest is just like any other social network that allows you to see where the content came from, giving you an opportunity to connect your board with Pinners who are not already following you.

3. Does the pin answer the question, “Is this helpful information and gives the reader specific steps to solve a problem?”

Asking this question helps me to remember the message of my pinboard. It wouldn’t make sense for someone to follow this board for social media marketing and suddenly they see pins for how to run a Google Adword campaign.

The Red Pinterest Slipper Fits

So the small business owner worked the steps to grow her pinboard. She knew her message and crafted the content of her pins to tell her followers who she was and how she could help them.

She looked at her Pinterest account and said, “Let me see if this pinning strategy fits me.”

She clicked into her Pinterest home feed, repinning images and sharing them to her board. She found that everything moved very easily, fitting her as if it had been a glove made perfectly for her hands.

She pinned her strategy every day. Her followers continued to grow bringing joy (and traffic) to her kingdom and website.

And the small business owner and Pinterest lived happily ever after.

 

PS Want to learn how to grow your Pinterest followers and turn Pinterest into one of your top marketing tools? This Pinterest Strategy guide is for you! Click here to grab your FREE copy of ‘How I Grew My Pinterest Account to Over 10,000 Followers‘.