Pinterest Best Practices from the #Mom2Summit

Did you know that Pinterest pins are 100x more spreadable than a tweet, and the half-life of a pin is 16,000 times longer than a Facebook post?

After learning that moms make up 70% of Pinterest’s 200 million monthly users, we were especially excited to sit in on an insightful session during the #Mom2Summit given by Tiffany Black from Pinterest. She offered a number of tips and tricks straight from Pinterest, and they were so helpful that we had to share our notes with you around Pinterest’s best practices for influencers.

First, here are some of the best ways to discover — and to get discovered — on Pinterest:

1. Home Feed: These are recommendations that Pinterest curates for users based on what they search for and their interactions (likes, saves, etc.).
2. Search Function: Pinterest recently upgraded their search results to make sure they’re including results from pins, boards and users.
3. Following Tab: You can follow users and specific boards.

Pinterest receives 2 billion search queries each month! Because so many people discover content through search, Pinterest recognized that the follower number on an influencer’s profile wasn’t an accurate reflection of their reach. That’s why they introduced the monthly visitors number! This number shows how many people saw a user’s pins in the last 30 days. It’s common to see that this number is much higher than your follower number!

If you are an influencer, here are other tips on how to maximize Pinterest for your business:

1. Get a business account. If you haven’t already, make sure to unlock the Pinterest analytics and more that are available to business accounts. You can tell when a user has converted to a business account, because the header will showcase diagonal photos (see below). Admins can customize the header of photos to feature a specific board or their latest pins; simply click on the pencil on the righthand corner of your profile.

   

2. Claim your website! Details on how to do that here.
3. Publish at least weekly, although daily is preferable.

Some other interesting takeaways include:

• 80% of pinners are on mobile; so use the vertical aspect ratio 2:3 for your pins. For example, 600px wide x 900px high. Square images will also work well when they are a minimum of 600px wide x 600px high.
• While there is no optimal number of hashtags for Pinterest, the pros recommend that users limit themselves to no more than 20 hashtags.
• Post multiple pins that all link to the same destination; this could improve your SEO. (Many Pinterest users in the room said “amen” to that one.) Pinterest also suggests that this could work well because different types of pins will appeal to different users.
• Customize your boards:
  • Be specific with their names, as this will help them show up in searches.
  • Always choose a category.
  • Don’t try to “be cute” and U S E  S P A C E S in between letters. This actually will work against you, and your boards will not show up in search results.
  • Don’t forget, you can archive boards.
• Add the Save button to your website; this button will increase your saves by 5X.
• Although text overlay might hurt your engagement on other sites, it performs very well on Pinterest.
• Make your content actionable! Ensure that your website is always linked properly in your pin.

What are some of your favorite Pinterest tips and hacks you would share with your fellow influencers?