The Pretty Big Pinterest Thread - Tutorials, Resources, Tricks And More

Let’s start with some existing discussions on FAA:

Do you have questions about Pinterest? Post them here please: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3468454

Pinterest.. What The Heck Is The Goal There? (Floyd Snider): https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3200315

I run a Pinterest Group Board with (at the very moment) 1790 followers. Group boards are collaborative boards, everyone with an invitation can save her / his pins in this board. Please apply here if you are interested: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2037331

Basics: How to start

Question (from Rich Franco): How to start?

O.K. so let’s start at the very beginning:

Sign up
Go to https://pinterest.com/business/create/ and sign up for a business account
If you already have a personal account: change it to a business one here: https://pinterest.com/business/convert/
You only get Pinterest Analytics if you have a business account - and I assume it’s against their Terms of Service if you want to sell things. And this (selling our art) is what we want, right?

Choose your business name wisely (but don’t freak out, you can change it later). You may include your niche and your name. For example Cat and Dog Art by John Doe or something like that. This is one important key for the search.

Complete your profile
Upload a profile picture (Settings, Profile, Change Picture). You find the settings menu in the upper right corner under the ‘person symbol’.
Check / update your profile. You can change the business or user name if you want. Write something about your business in the About you field. Try to use some keywords that fit (to your art, your style). If you sell pictures of cats the words cat and / or cats should be there, maybe combined with art or prints etc. Again: important for search.

Please don’t forget to do this things. I see many accounts without a proper description or with a funny name that does not do anything for Pinterest search optimization. These are basics and they are important. No need to overcomplicate it though, you can optimize it later. There are some nifty tricks to find the right keywords :-)

Scroll through the rest of the settings and decide which notifications you want to get etc.

What about this ‘Verify your website’ thing? This can’t be done with your FAA profile or your Pixels Artist Website. It can be done with a Wordpress blog or if you have access to the coding of your website or if you are allowed upload a file into the root folder of your web server. Read more about it here: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/confirm-your-website
You get more Analytics when doing this.

To be continued...

Matthias sorry I deleted my questions so this thread will stand as an ad for you.

Dave

Dave, would you do me a favor and ask your questions in this thread please: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3468454

As stated above in the first post of this discussion: Do not ask questions here, use this discussion instead if possible: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3468454

Thank you!

I am totally confused - there are too many threads here. Someone needs to choose just one thread and leave it at that.

Dave you are getting this wrong. Completly.
RD sorry to confuse you. Thanks for your feedback. I did not want to make it complicated.

@all: This was my intention:

This discussion (that you are reading right now) should be for all the answers to your questions about Pinterest, edited as a structured 'mini course' from beginning (how to start with Pinterest) to the end (if there is one). To keep this discussion (the 'mini course' easy to read, clear and uncluttered I started a thread with Pinterest questions: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3468454

In this discussion (that you are reading right now) all of you are very welcome to post your Pinterest tips, tricks and advice. So we will get a nice Pinterest resource thread that is easy to read.

But I guess this might not work, maybe it is to confusing. Do you want me to continue this or does it not make any sense?

ah so anyone can post, but not questions.

It is a resource thread that was not clear before.

I put my pins on sale. I put my FAA prints on sale. I get plenty of saves on P that way. It was my crude way of adding the topic of prices. I look forward to hearing how we add prices from our AWs to our pins if possible.

Dave

O.K. I'm still not sure if this was a good idea but here is the next module of our 'How to start with Pinterest' course ;-)

As we have out shiny new profile now it’s time to create the first boards!

Creating a board is a breeze, just click on the + sign / Create board area.

There are 2 things to decide now: The name of the board and if it will be a public or a secret one. Give your first board a descriptive name and include some meaningful keywords. So what will be in your first five boards? Yes, I would recommend to create at least 5 Boards in the beginning. What do you have to offer? If you are into elephant art you could create boards like this: The big elephant board, Elephant Paintings for sale, Elephant Fine Art Photography, How to educate your elephant, Elephant humor, you get it. Remember: you want to be found on Pinterest when people search for elephant paintings so name your boards wisely.

Of course you won’t have a board ‘How to educate your elephant’ but if you are into the dog paintings business this one could be interesting. ‘How to educate your dog’ could be a strong title to pull dog lovers over to your beautiful dog paintings. Just save some pins with great tips and tricks about dog education into this board and some dog lovers may find your profile, click around and fall in love with your pictures.

Important: Give every board a description! To do this just go into the board (per clicking on it) and use the edit symbol (the pen) in the upper left corner of the board. Don’t just write down keywords (like dog, dogs, animal, animals, …), write a nice text like this: Dogs are my favorite animals and I love to paint them because… You get it.

Choose a category for the board (for example ‘art’ or ‘animals and pets’). In the example I used above I would put the ‘Elephant Paintings’ board into art and the ‘How to educate your elephant’ board into animals and pets.

Don’t create secret boards for now. They are for your eyes only, you could use them if you want to pin personal stuff that does not fit into your business page and you don’t want to have a personal profile just for this.

Next module: what and how to save (pin) in those new boards.

Appreciate your info + + + Matthias -- I'm finally on my way into this, thanks to you!

Your tutorial's excellent.




carmenhathaway.com

It makes perfect sense, please continue

Matthias, I just want to THANK YOU for all the inspiration and motivation. I finally started testing Pinterest and I must admit I'm surprised with the effects - over 1200 views in only few days, wow!
So far FB was my only working SM tool but now P. is no. 1!

Carmen, Debbie and Arletta: thank you so much, I really appreciate your encouragement! Arletta: so great to hear this. And this is just the beginning... :-)

Pin away!

O.K. our profile is ready and we even have at least 5 Boards with great titles and useful description. What’s next? Right: pinning. Or saving as they (Pinterest) want to call it now. Sorry but I just love to pin so I will mix up the two words.

What to pin? Well, your own stuff of course. And (re)pins from others. I know what some of you might think now: ‘Duh! You want me to pin pics from others? From my competitors? No way!’ Relax… You don’t have to do this. But it will help your own pins get more traction. Why is this? Pinterest wants us to be good pinners, they want us to curate content that our target audience is interested in. And the Pinterest algorithm rewards it. But please don’t just pin everything you find. And because someone saves a pin from you you don’t have to repin one of hers (yes, hers, Pinterest still has way more female than male pinners). So what is your topic, your niche? Pin beautiful, interesting content that fits.

How do I pin? You have some amazing pics on FAA / Pixels, right? Pin from there or - much better - pin from your Artist Website. This way visitors will not get disturbed by the amazing pics of your fellow FAA Artists…

There are several ways how you can save / pin, two of them:

1. Go to the pic you want to pin. Look for the little Pinterest icon (just behind its friends from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and StumbleUpon. If there is no Pinterest icon please go to Behind the scenes, Sharing buttons (in the Marketing section) and activate it. Pin the picture by clicking on the Pinterest icon. Fill out the description. Yes please do it. Descriptions. Are. Very. Important. Short or long descriptions? Just a bunch of keywords of a long story? Well, my friends, there are different options. And they always change. As Pinterest does. Both can work. I prefer not just to throw in 10 keywords and try to write two or three sentences that includes some important keywords. Some time ago Pinterest suggested to write long descriptions but there are some big pinners that seem to have more success with short ones. So you might just try that.

2. Use the Pinterest Browser button: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/all-about-pinterest-browser-button This tends to work better for me and many others than the FAA Pinterest Icon.

So go ahead and pin at least 5 of your images in each of your boards. If you have a board like ‘How to educate your dog’ you might leave it empty for now.

Then look around Pinterest. Search for some topics that may be interesting for your audience. Find 3 or 4 great pins from others and save them in one of your boards. By the way, this is called a repin (pinning an existing pin).

To be continued...

Pin away Part 2 (Doing it the right way)

I don’t have much time today so I will keep it short and sweet. But please take care: these are important topics!

Pin vertical! Vertical pins are doing much better than horizontal ones. They are more visible in the feed, people click and repin them more often. So be sure to pin all of your vertical images! Of course you can and should pin the horizontal ones too but be prepared that they will get less attention. We will discuss a solution for horizontal images later.

Pin seasonal - and early enough! Seasonal content is usually doing great. So if you have spring images start pinning them in February (or even mid January). Pin them until the end of April, then start pinning for summer. Pinning / Planning / Shopping for Christmas / Holiday can start in September!

Be consistent! Try to pin every day if possible. Pin multiple times a day. Try to pin between 5 and 50 pins per day.

Choose the right times. According to several case studies the best time to post on Pinterest is either between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. But pin some stuff on other times too, we all live in so much different time zones.

Thanks Matthias! I appreciate all of the information, I'll convert my account to business too!

Matthias this is great. Thank you for taking this on. Pinterest is by far my most active SM site but I am still learning. I haven't really used it much over the last year since I posted thousands of images from the Quintessentially British FAA group that I run but I still get regular repins every day so it's sort of self replicating.

~Richard
http://www.reevephotos.com

.

Thank you Christine and Richard. Carol, is there anything I can do for you? If you have any questions regarding Pinterest please feel free to ask them in this discussion: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3468454

Pin away Part 3 (Group Boards)

Some of you asked where to pin to. And you wanted to know if it is o.k. to save the same Pin multiple time to different boards etc.

Pinning the same picture to multiple boards is not only o.k. It is a good technique to enhance your reach. But please: don’t do it all at once, this might look spammy.

This is the way how I do it: Assume I uploaded a new photo to FAA and want to promote it via Pinterest. First I go to my Artist Website and pin the image (via the Pinterest Browser Button, see above) to one of my own Pinterest boards. The next day I pin it to Group board number 1, the day after to number 2 - you get it. Most times I don’t do that manually but use a scheduler. We will cover Pinterest schedulers later. If you have some of your own boards that the Pin fits in - save it there too.

O.K. Group board number 1 and 2 - this sounds vague… What are group boards, how do I find them and how do I participate?

Glad you asked. Group Boards are collaborative boards. Everybody that receives an invitation can pin her stuff - or pins from others - in a group board. Usually a group board does have a theme, for example ‘The very best dog pictures’. A group board may have only two or three contributors but there are many boards with hundreds or thousands of people contributing.

There is no special search for Group boards on Pinterest. There are several ways to find them. You may start with pingroupie.com They usually have a big ad for a Pinterest Course on top of the page, you can search for Group boards below. Unfortunately the site is quite dated now, the owner seems not to update it any more. But it’s a good starting point.

So you found some great Group boards - what to do now?

Do yourself a favor and read the rules (if there are any) of the group board before you apply. Maybe they don’t want to have pillows etc. so you better don’t pin them into this board. The board admin (the owner, the person who created it) may kick you out really fast.

O.K. fine but how do I apply? It depends. If you are lucky the owner of the board put it in the description. Something like: ‘Drop me a mail at example@whoever.com’ or ‘Please comment on a pin in the Welcome board’. Often you will find nothing in the description of the board. Maybe the board is not open for new contributors. But you can always try to contact the owner of the group board.
But Matthias, how do I know who the owner is? This one is easy: Open the group board. In the upper right corner you see some of the profile pics of the contributors to this board. The very left one is the owner. Clicking on the pic takes you to her profile. Maybe you can find some more informations here. Does she have a website? Or a link to a FB profile? Write a nice email asking if you can contribute to the board. Follow the profile of the owner (or the group board) first. Often you will here nothing, sometimes it works. Don’t give up, you will get into some group boards for sure.

If you are interested in my Group Board for FAA Artists (with 1.8K Followers) I will be more than happy to invite you. Use this discussion please: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2037331

Group boards can be a great way to get a better reach for your pins. If a group board has 1000 Followers all of them may (in theory) see your pins in their feed. Not all of them will because Pinterest has a smart feed - an algorithm just like Facebook etc. that is constantly trying to find out what a user wants to see.

If you like beeing part of a specific group board you might repin on of the Pins from another contributor from time to time (to one of your own boards). This helps your fellow pinner, it helps the GroupBoard (Pins in it have more chances to get seen) and it helps yourself getting a good Pinterest Citizen. The Algorithm rewards this :-)

To be continued...

I am just new to FAA. Great info here Mathias. Please continue...

Matthias, what do board owners need exactly in order to add you to their group—email, Pinterest name, Pinterest URL, or something else?


—————
Joseph Westrupp
bestilled.com

Thanks for the info, Mathias! I have a Pinterest but never use it, though have a few times looked at some! Think I may give it al try now and change to business...never thought of how to.

Thanks a lot Mary and Larry.

Joseph: either the exact Pinterest name (or the URL) or just an email address. If you have any more questions regarding Pinterest please feel free to ask them in this discussion: https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=3468454

Irving: this is no discussion to post images. Would you please be so kind and delete it?

@all: I wanted to make this discussion a Pinterest resource thread. With a 'mini course' by yours truly and your Pinterest tips and tricks. Maybe this is too complicated but I thought it might be worth a try...

Matthias. Thank you. :)
I for one am finding this really useful. I have added a description to my profile. I have no idea why I forgot to do this. I have added a new board and am pinning pins twice a day.... analytics show a rise in views, Re-pins etc.
Bit daunted that I probably need to add some sort of description to each pin, but your tutorials are massively helpful. Thank you again.

I still use it because it's the one place where people actually voluntarily go to look for decoration ideas and ideas for presents and stuff, as opposed to social media where people hang out for other reasons and get put off quickly with 'salesy' messaging. I think of it as something of a shop in a vast mall where I just keep putting my stuff on shelves and they sit there and may get dusty but every once in a while someone rummages around and finds something that may have been sitting in a corner for years.
In contrast, with the likes of Twitter, posts get seen for a few hours max before they disappear down peoples' feeds. Pins are sort of eternal, even if click-through rates are low (1 outbound click per ~1500-2000 impressions). Pinterest is also well indexed by Google.

Used it, got thousands of daily hits, some clickthrough, did the idea pins, even more hits, then suddenly, 35 000 down to 3500, down to 350, then 35 daily. Now up to 3500 weekly, started posting again occasionally. Recently started to post there again. On the upswing, never quite figured it out. Since GA4 i can see some traffIc from pins to FAA.

I still use it in the sense that I do create a pin for every image I upload, mainly because of what WE said above about pins being sort of eternal and indexed by Google, but I don't do much else with it. Every now and then I'll go pin one of my pins to a group board - I used to be a bit more diligent with that, doing it every day, but that dropped off because I rarely got any views from Pinterest according to Google Analytics. Even now, it says that in the past 28 days I've had 752 sessions, and only 3 of those have been from Pinterest.

THANK YOU ABBIE!! For resurrecting this thread.
I had no idea we could post direct to Pinterest again..... That's going to be my job over the next few days....although I wonder how many pins will get me flagged as spam!

Mo: take it slow. Start with 3 - 5 Pins per day, not more.

Thank you Matthias...I have done three so will stop!!

It works for some, that's for sure. The son of one of my clients used Pinterest to promote affiliate links to gifts ("for dad", "for Christmas", "for techies" etc) and made a fortune. A FORTUNE. People go there when they are in "dream mode" -- thinking of what they'd buy for their new house/new baby/husband -- so if you go where people dream, you catch them they are ready for what you have. Help them dream, I say.

That said, I am at the very beginning, and trying to figure out how to get traction (when I was growing up in the 70s,F1 racer Jackie Stewart did a popular tv ad for tires (tyres) that "really gripped the road", with emphasis on the Scottish rolled Rs. Now all I can hear is his voice in my head as I try to get tRRRaction. ;-)

Thanks to Abbie for reviving a useful thread

Pinterest is dead. Let it RIP.

Tibor, do you have anything that can back that up? My data say otherwise...

I just logged back in on the desktop, and it looks like the interface is back to what I'm used to. It had changed for me a while back. I remember seeing a few pins that I didn't make that linked back to my Mastodon account which was strange.

I don't think Pinterest is dead, Tibor. Per https://www.statista.com/statistics/463353/pinterest-global-mau/ it has 498 million users per month...

All I know is that I'm constantly interrupted with Pinterest pop-ups showing work of others, they think I might like


I would love to assume that there are others out there, that are bothered by pop-ups of my work

I think Pinterest is very efficient for those who joined it earlier, like Matthias, when it was still possible to gain tRRRaction ;-).... I've had a normal account from the beginning, I wasn't selling my work then, just pinning some specific topics I was interested in and I got a huge following without any efforts. Years later I created a business account to promote my own website and my pixels store and with a lot more effort and time invested it got me to practically nowhere...
The thing is, they change the game every year, they use some idiotic algorythm to flag you 'spam', and while they claim the most important factor for a pin is 'new content' in reality they ignore new pins (with new visual content, proper keywording and description etc.) - at least this is my experience. Just type in any term in their search, it will bring you hundreds of decade old pins with no keyword or description, many of them irrelevant, and zero new content. (It might be that for not art related topics it's different, but I doubt it.) And the same goes for the home feed pins, no new content offered, unless it's a paid ad.
I've just changed my pixels site to a custom domain and was thinking about starting a fresh business account (my older b. account got flagged as spam, I guess, because I have hundreds of years old pins with visually new content but zero views...) - but I think it would be probably a waste of time...

Moira,

I have to say, I'm fascinated with your "Theme and Variation" series

Up until a little more than a year ago, I got a good number of sales through Pinterest. I'm not sure what has changed over the past 8 months or so, but I'm not getting much traffic. I haven't put in the time to figure it out.

My guess is the latest thing came out and everyone went to that. More than likely was tik tok, that seems to be absorbing brains really fast. It has that right amount of short attention instant gratification that pintrest had. For a while the word pinterest meant making something with crafts... Oh did you pinterest that? So it watered down quite a bit what it was for. And now there is a new shiny thing in the room.

Stupid human challenges to test the darwin effect... See how many pufferfish I can fit into my mouth... etc


----Mike Savad

I use Pinterest more then any other SM because it's easy to post there, but I get the least traffic from there. I used to take the time to create these nice vertical ads for each of my photos but it was getting too time consuming and not worth the effort with the slow traffic from there even though a lot of people do see the pins according to Pinterest. They just don't click on them.

I think the older SM sites are all slowing down. Everyone is going to Tik Tok like Mike said and some of the other newer stuff. People really like videos. I wish I had more time to make them as I do see they get more attention. One website I used to use to make them is now charging so I quite. I have a video studio program I use but it's just so time consuming and was nice with the online program was fairly quick to do. I haven't tried tik tok bc of the vertical orientation. I don't do any of my videos in that format and don't want to take the time to do them in both formats. Those vertical videos on pinterest do get more attention.

Thanks a lot, Roger :)

I'm still dabbling in it. I made a recent sale and saw that the image had been repinned several times on Pinterest, so maybe that's where the sale came from.

In my enthusiasm, I decided to create a carousel pin and an idea pin. Unless I'm missing something, it appears those can now only be made with a paid ad. Anyone have the scoop on this?

@Mary Lee: You can make them without paying for an ad. Idea Pins as we knew them are gone, they are now basically a single video (or image).

If I was wanting to create a specific public group board so it can be seen by anyone, can it be set up so others can add to it, but at the same time I can remove submission if they don't fit the criteria?

@Rebecca: Yes. You can delete pins and also remove contributors.

Thank you!

@Matthias Thanks. I figured out how to add multiple images on a pin on my iPhone. I like that it even allowed me to add music.

As far as I can tell, looks like the iPhone will be the way to go, as I can't do that on my desktop.

@Mary Lee: Yes, some things work only on iPhone (and Android). But please be aware of the fact that Pinterest does not support the original Idea Pins any longer. Existing ones will eventually be converted to Video Pins, which is usually okay.

.

@Matthias Thanks for the update. It's rather interesting to see where they're going. I haven't given up yet on IG