Group boards are a great tools for collaboration. When I became a user of Pinterest in 2010, I quickly saw the value of sharing inspiration with my personal styling clients. I was so happy when Pinterest rolled out the ability to share a board with another user not too long after Pinterest's launch. Rather than sending images back and forth, making Polyvore collages and making mood boards in Photoshop, I could make a group board with links directly to commerce sites where my clients could purchase their suggested wardrobe pieces. But, can you use the group board feature as a marketing tool for your business? Yes. Should businesses have group boards with influencers? Yes. How? Keep reading... BENEFITS TO HOSTING A GROUP BOARD:

1| You have an additional people helping you populate your Pinterest account with great content.

2| Your board is seen on your contributors' profiles, which increases brand awareness

3| You have a different consumer eye and perspective contributing, which can help you relate to a different type of audience.

TIPS ON SELECTING YOUR CONTRIBUTORS:

1| Review your contributor's Pinterest profile to see that the content they share is in line with the lifestyle of your businesses.

2 | Other than having a lot of followers, find out the engagement statistics of their Pinterest profile. Do they get a lot of repins and comments? That will tell you if the content they find for you would be of interest to your audience as well.

3| Choose someone who has a similar audience to yours. You want them to help reach your ideal customer, so they need to understand who that is. (Age, location, gender, etc.)

4| Create an incentive for them to contribute. Either compensate them for curating your board with product, money or allow them to share some of their work or products with your audience to cross promote themselves. This will help ensure proper care and time for their contribution.

IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE:

1| The content a contributor shares is seen only by the followers of the host's board (a.k.a. your followers). If you are wanting the pins to be shared with contributor's followers they would need to host the board.

2| Choose no more than 5 people to contribute to a board at a time. Quality control is important, and that's harder to manage when you have a lot of people sharing at one time.

3| Create guidelines for how often you expect your contributor to pin. Decide how many pins total over a period time they should share. Do you want them to share at least one pin per day? Is there a time during the day and/or when your audience is most engaged? If so, ask your contributor to share their content within that timeframe.

4| If you are worried that your contributor may share something against your brand guidelines, consider making a group secret board that you contributor pins to so you can review the content before it is made public. Just remember, the more steps you ask your contributors to take the more time they are devoting to the project. Make sure to compensate them accordingly.

Have more questions about hosting a group board? Please comment below or feel free to email me, alexandra@avestyles.com.