How to Find the Best Pinterest Group Boards for Your Business or Blog

The Group Board Debate

It seems like every week we hear something different about Group boards.

One week, we’re told that they don’t help share your pins so stop pinning to them. Two weeks later, the news goes out that Group boards are the best place to get the most repins and we should all be pinning to them.

So which is it? Are Group boards good for our Pinterest accounts or should we stop pinning to them?

I’m not here to host the great Group Board Debate. I’m here to tell you that they work IF you can find the right ones to pin to and you work them the right way.

I can honestly tell you that when I pin my best content to the right Group boards, my pins get shared, liked and added into the Pinterest feed of people who are not already following me.

They work when you work it!

How to find the best Group Boards

Finding the best group boards take a bit of work but once you connect with the right one, the payoffs to your followers, repins and traffic to your site comes back to you tenfold.

The biggest thing about making Group boards work for you is to make sure that the board’s content fits with your business or blog. Don’t join any Group board that’s out there just to be on a Group board. Remember, the Pinners following that board hit that Follow button for a reason – they want to know more about that board’s topic.

So if you join a board that shares resources for dogs and your blog is about DIY tips and money saving ideas, then your content wouldn’t make sense in this board. And chances are, not too many Pinners will repin your content or even click on your links.

And being on the best Pinterest Group boards would be easy if you could figure out how to find them.

If you didn’t realize this, Pinterest has been silently making changes about how we can find and connect with Group boards that make sense for our business or blogs. Honestly, I didn’t even realize that this change had happened until I was having a Pinterest Audit coaching session with a client and I was researching Group boards for her to join.

Here’s an example of the steps we used to take to find Group boards:

I used the search term of Travel Boards and clicked on the BOARDS button on the top to find boards. When you scanned the boards that came up, you could look for the grey image of a group of people in the corner. That little grey image let you know it’s a Group board.

 

 

Now when I run the same search for a Travel Board – using the same steps to find the same board … but look – no more grey Group board image:

The new change about Group boards is that the little grey image is gone. Basically, Pinterest has made Group boards harder for us to find during a search.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to click on EVERY board that comes up in my search to see which ones are Group boards and which ones are just someone’s personal board that they’re pinning to.

So what are you supposed to do to find the best Group boards?

Time to do a Little Research in Pinterest

When I discovered this Group board change, I used one my tricks to reverse engineer what I had been doing and upped it to the next level. Once I started doing this search technique, I was able to find even better Group boards than when I just running a search from the Guided Search bar on top of Pinterest.

I’m going to walk you through the steps I use to find the best Group boards for your business:

1. Here’s the first step you need to start doing – run a search for PEOPLE not BOARDS using the best keywords for the type of content that you’re looking for. Using my same Travel Group board example, I ran a search for “travel adventure” { be real specific with your keywords – I get a different set of results if I used the words “travel agent” } and clicked on PEOPLE.

2. I got a whole of bunch of options of pinners who have used those keywords in their profiles. Then I start clicking on the profile pictures with the profile names that interest me the most.

3. In the first row of results, I found a Travel blogger. Then I clicked on her profile and scrolled down, scanning her boards. I’m specifically looking for the boards that have a large number of pins on them.

These are just a few of the Group boards that I found on this Travel Blogger’s profile. I easily found at least 15 really good – and relevant! – Pinterest Group boards just by finding this person’s profile.

Seriously, how easy was that!

 

 

You’ve Found Some Boards … now what?

Before you go through the steps { and there are quite a few hoops to jump through! }, spend a few minutes reviewing the Group board. The idea here is to pin to the right Group boards so use this assessment to determine if you want to join or not:

• Look at the repin and like count on the pins in the board – the higher the number of repins and likes, the more likely that your pins will be repinned and liked.
• Click on a few of the images – are they going to a website connected to the pin? Are most of the pins engaging images? Do they have key-word rich pin descriptions to help them get found?
• And now ask yourself, does this board make sense for the content that I pin?

 

How to Get Added to the Group Board

Once you find a good Group board, the fun begins to get added to the board! There will be some boards where you’ll see an email address where you can request to be added to the board.

But if the board owner hasn’t listed a way to contact them in the board description, you can find out WHO owns the board by looking at the board’s URL and look for the first Pinner’s profile picture in the list of Pinners who contribute to the board.

Take a look at this example from one of the Travel Group boards I found:

Once you figure out who the owner of the board is, you can email that person a private message through Pinterest asking to be added to the board. Another option you can do is leave the Pinner a message in the comment section of a pin that the person has added to the group board.

A simple note that says, “I love your board! Can you please add me to contribute to your board?” works the best. And don’t forget to add in the email address you use with Pinterest! This is the easiest way for the Group board admin person to add you to the board.

The last point I want to make about group boards is to make sure that you follow the guidelines of the Group board. If they say you can only pin once a day, don’t flood the Group board with 10 pins in one pinning session. If they tell you that you can’t self-promote, don’t pin your sales or promotional images.

Remember, this is someone’s Group board and they set the rules. If you don’t follow their guidelines, they can remove you from the board as quick as they added you.

 

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