How to Use Pinterest Group Boards Effectively

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.

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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.

How to Visually Brand Your Pinterest Profile

As a Pinterest influencer with almost one million followers and being a Pinterest ambassador, I've had the chance to teach a lot of classes about how to use Pinterest as an effective marketing tool. I've also done quite a bit of account management for brands, and one problem that I immediately identify with most of my clients is that their Pinterest profile doesn't embody the feeling and essence of the brand itself. So, I thought I share some key things that can remedy that. Before you even open your browser do these things:

1. Identify your brand colors (ex: pastel blue, pastel pink and pastel green)

2. State your brand's purpose (ex: to provide a beautiful, fun and enjoyable bath time experience for kids and parents)

3. Identify the overall feeling and emotion tied to your brand's image (ex: clean, warm, playful)

Now, open up Pinterest on your desktop computer, and follow these steps:

1. Ask yourself, what cover images currently embody the feeling, brand message and palette of your business?

2. If you identify some that don't, open up each board, click "edit," click change "cover image", and then scroll through until you find a cover image that resonates with those three things.

3.  If you're not finding an image that you feel satisfied with start searching within Pinterest for your criteria within your board category (fashion, home decor, food, etc.). For example, when working with Be Good, a kid's bath and body line, I had a hard time finding content within their boards that was clean, soft, pastel and warm - all of the qualities they want to be know for. So, for the women's fashion board I searched within Pinterest to find "pastel fashion," and then found some images that met the brand requirements and pinned them to the board. I then went back and set the cover image.

Example:

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BEFORE

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AFTER

Extra things to double check:

1.  Do all of your titles fit or are they cut off? You want them to fit within the board pixel width and be 23 characters or less

2. Do you have too many or too few boards? The magic range I try to tell brands to aim for is between 15 and 30 boards.

3. Do your boards reflect the lifestyle of your brand? Share what the persona of your brand would eat, what spaces they would live in, where they would travel to, what they would wear, etc.

For more Pinterest tips and advice, click here. If you're in need of help setting up your Pinterest profile or strategizing your company's voice on Pinterest, you can always email me for consulting pricing. alexandra@avestyles.com.