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Pinterest Tips: A Baker’s Dozen

We’ve searched the Web high and low for some of the best tips to help you make your Pinterest the best it can be and reach the maximum amount of people. Check out these awesome tips:

These tips come from Jessica Turner at PR Daily & The Mom Creative:

1. Use text on your photos, or create a title graphic 

This is the single most important thing you can do to stimulate pins and repins. When people pin and repin on Pinterest, they are scanning through a lot of thumbnails. Having text on a photo makes it easier for users to identify what an image is and if they want to pin it.

2. Ask friends who are active on Pinterest to pin your content

If your content is relevant to a friend’s Pinterest boards, ask if they would be willing to pin your post. It is important to do this on the first day, when you are trying to gain momentum on Pinterest.

I have seen a direct correlation between asks and posts going viral. That early traction can make a big difference.

3. Push the post out via social media, multiple times over an appropriate period

While I am not an advocate of posting every single blog post to Twitter, Facebook, etc. multiple times, certain posts that I am really trying to push via Pinterest I will share numerous times.

For instance, I had a post that received more than 19,000 pins related to Father’s Day gift ideas. I tweeted about that post almost every day for the two weeks leading up to Father’s Day. Each day, I saw more pins to Pinterest, more traffic from Pinterest, and more sales from the affiliate links within the post. I was creative with my tweets, posted at different times of day and had other unrelated content in my Twitter stream, so it wasn’t like my followers were only hearing about that post.

4. Pin from your favorite sites If you see something you like on a website pin it! (I have the Pin It tool installed on my toolbar, which makes it really easy to pin from any site. It takes about 5 seconds to install.) Pinterest is only as good as the stuff that is pinned on it, so it needs people to pin new items to it. Plus, pins help drive traffic to your favorite sites.

5. Write meaningful descriptions (include key words, @+a name will tag someone) Pinterest requires you to write a description of some sort. Be sure your description tells what the pin is.  It is also nice when you include the blog name or tag someone.  You may have noticed that more and more bloggers are including text on their images to make the images “Pinterest friendly” and helpful for viewers on Pinterest.

Check out these tips from Ashley Zeckman:

6. There are SEO benefits: Pinterest is indexed by Google and should be part of your backlinking and social linking strategy.

7. Create community: Users can easily embed their social sites and contact information into the Pinterest profile description.  This alerts users to all of the ways that they can connect with you.

8. Measure, refine, repeat:  To determine what has been pinned from your boards you can visit: http://pinterest.com/source/yourURL.com or utilize tools like Repinly.com. Viewing your top pins will help guide your content strategy.

Amy Lynn Andrews offers these Pinterest Tips:

9. Write your own summary description. Don’t copy and paste the whole post, the whole recipe or all the instructions from the original post directly in your pin. Not only does it clutter the images with unnecessary text (see my pinterest pet peeves post), it’s not good Pinterest manners. Plus, posts are copyrighted so pasting them in their entirety is copyright infringement (more on copyright below).

10. Space out your pins instead of flooding the stream. If you’re pinning a lot of stuff at once, you can overwhelm your followers. For example, if you’re researching black shoes and spend an hour pinning a gazillion pairs of black shoes to your “Rockin’ Black Shoes” board, anyone who follows you will just see a sea of black shoes in their stream. (I’m guilty of flooding the stream.) Instead, spread it out a bit.

11. Follow individual boards to cut out the noise. One of the nice things about Pinterest is that you can follow individual boards. You don’t have to follow a person and therefore, all of their boards (although you can do that too). So, maybe you want to follow my “handy tips” board but you don’t want to follow my “easy peasy crafts” board. To subscribe to individual boards, simply click on the name of any Pinterest user and you’ll see all their boards. If you follow the person, you’ll follow all their boards. Otherwise, just pick and choose the boards you want.

12. Use Pinterest to connect with brands. You’d better believe companies are taking notice of Pinterest. Of course, we, the little people, have an advantage. That advantage? We’re small enough that we can dive in and get our hands dirty quick. Big companies, on the other hand are sometimes a little slower to the punch. What about approaching a large company you don’t see on there, let them know of the rage that Pinterest is and suggest ideas for the two of you to work together? Be respectful of course, but lead them by the hand and make suggestions from which you can both benefit.

And there is always something you shouldn’t do on Pinterest, Daniel P. Howley explains:

13. The wrong way to post material on Pinterest: The social network discourages its users, even marketers and businesses, from engaging in blatant self-promotion. So adding pins about your company alone won’t cut it. Georgieva, however, says businesses can use this restriction as an opportunity to get creative by pinning topics that showcase the lifestyle their brand represents. Try working pins about your business into these lifestyle boards as a reminder to followers that that board’s particular topic is exactly what your business is all about.