Tips for Getting the Most out of Pinterest

Last week I spoke about my love of Pinterest and the ways that I use it to help me organise, plan and collaborate.

This week I’m sharing some of my learnings from using Pinterest. While it’s a relatively simple platform to use, there are some little tricks to help you get the most out of it, both as a viewer and as a pinner.

Tips for Viewing and Re-pinning

If you use Pinterest predominantly as a browser who re-pins other people’s pins or pins straight from websites, these tips will help you create pins and boards that are well organised and easy to find.

When you are re-pinning someone else’s pin, be sure to give it an appropriate description. Sometimes pins have . or “love this” or “this is fab” as the description and that’s incredibly unhelpful when it comes to searching and organising pins. So be sure to check the description and edit it if you need to.
Be very clear in your board descriptions. This will save you time because you’ll know exactly where to pin stuff and where to find it again.
When you’re choosing an image to pin from a blog post or website, choose the image that best describes what it is you want to remember from the post. For example, a blog post might bring up several different images that you could pin. Pick the one that tells you at a glance what the blog or website is about. This will make it easier to find what you’re looking for when you are scanning a board. In this example below, I will pin the image on the left.

Tips for Creating Pinnable Content

If you are a blogger or own a website and want people to be able to share your awesome content quickly and easily on Pinterest, try these little tricks:

Make it easy for people to pin your images by giving the images a short but useful description. Use words that people might search for if they want to learn more about your topic.

HINT: In WordPress, you can create the description for an image by changing the “Title” section when you upload your image to the Media Library (see example below). The Title will automatically be the name of your image file (15-04-14.jpg or something similarly unhelpful) so it really is a good idea to take the time to give it a good title as this is what will automatically come up as the description when someone pins your image. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to quickly pin something from your website.
Create blog post banners which tell readers exactly what the blog post is about.