How to Use Pinterest for Personal Branding

When we think about using social media for personal branding, most of us would immediately think of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, right?

Well, what about Pinterest?

Pinterest-for-Personal-Branding

At first glance, you may think of Pinterest as an extremely visual-oriented digital book marketing tool that doesn’t fit in your personal branding strategy unless you are in areas such as retail, fashion, arts, design, etc. But Pinterest can be a terrifically complementary to your digital presence and personal brand no matter what niche you are in.

Gemma Craven, Executive Director of Strategic Markets at Spredfast explained in a webinar with Adweek recently that Pinterest has reached significant scale and maturity with more than 70 million users and 1 billion boards.

Moreover, according to a study from Shareaholic, Pinterest drives more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. We recently uploaded all of our personal branding articles and blog posts on Pinterest, and it has already become the 3rd biggest social referral source to Delightful’s website!

So, are you ready to know how to use Pinterest for personal branding? Let’s get started.

Treat Pinterest differently

Pinterest is a unique social platform in many ways:

Pinterest Difference
As mentioned in a blog post by Tailwind, the news isn’t news on Pinterest. When something newsworthy happens, people will go on Twitter and Facebook to check out the fact and discussion, but never Pinterest. This is because Pinterest arranges their feed in the order of best-first rather than newest-first, which means the content you created will continue to be discoverable on Pinterest for months or even years as long as they are helpful and adding value.

These differences make Pinterest a perfect platform to present a better-rounded personal brand for you and give you more reasons to utilize it in addition to other social media platforms you are currently using.

What to pin?

Its topic-centered streamlined format makes Pinterest a great place to showcase your assets visually. It’s different from LinkedIn, where you list out your experiences all together mainly using text. Wisely organized Pinterest boards can work as your portfolios that exude your personal brand from different perspectives.

Here are a few topics you could pin about that can build out your personal brand as a professional who’s knowledgeable and passionate about what you do:

  • Showcase your work: articles, blog posts, books, pictures, etc.
  • Speaking photos and presentations that showcase your expertise as a speaker
  • Reading list of books or articles from your industry
  • Industry stats, research, study, infographics, etc.
  • Personal interest that humanize your personal brand

Pinterest-Mel-Carson

(Pinterest Boards pinned by Mel Carson, Founder of Delightful Communications)

Also, you don’t need to delete any pins that’re irrelevant to your personal brand, just create a few secret boards and move the old pins there.

Another benefit of organizing your assets with different boards is that you can point people to the right place where they can find the information they want at once. For instance, if you are pitching yourself to a publication as a contributor, you can just send them the link to a specific Pinterest board where all your relevant sample articles are listed.

Make it visual

Think your assets are not visual enough to pin on Pinterest? No worries, you can now make almost everything visual with the help of multiple online tools:

  • Pinstamatic: Turn websites, quotes, notes, tweet, even music to pins
  • Page2Images: Website screenshot generator
  • Quozio: Turn words into pretty images
  • Piktochart: Infographic creation tool
  • Canva: Design images with the right size for Pinterest
  • Pixlr: A free online image editor. Enables to fix, adjust, and filter images in a browser.

Make it helpful

Gemma from Spredfast said during the webinar, what matters the most for the performance of a pin is how helpful it is for people. Providing helpful information about yourself or sharing you knowledge helps people to know about you or learn about your niche.

Here are a few tips on how to make pins more helpful:

  • Write detailed and keyword-rich pin description. The description is vital for attracting and providing helpful information for the readers. According to a study, pins with descriptions about 300 characters long are most repinnable. However, Gemma suggests marketers not to use hashtags on Pinterest as the pins are not categorized by hashtags as they are on Twitter or Instagram.
  • Name your pin image with keywords. Think Pinterest as a search engine when uploading an image for your pins. The file name is what Pinterest will look into when people search for information.
  • Include links in the pin description. Although Pinterest automatically links your URL to the image, the users need to click on the pin first to expand it before being able to visit the website. Adding a URL directly to the description saves this step for users so they can directly click on the URL and go to where you direct them to!
  • Use vertical pins. According to a study, taller images are more repinnable (800+ pixels.)

Pinterest-Right-Crop

(Adweek Webinar)

  • Enrich your image. Create or share step-by-step, how-tos, and infographics which have been proven to be popular on Pinterest.

Also, don’t forget to add and verify your personal or company website to your profile. It will not only help drive traffic to your site but also enable you to use Pinterest analytics for business to check the performance of your pins.

Pinterest-Mel-Carson-Profile

If you have not started using Pinterest as a personal branding tool, is it something you’re more likely to consider now? We would love to know about how it goes!

And don’t forget to:

Subscribe to The Delightful Times

Follow @Delightful on Twitter

Like the Delightful Facebook Page

Join us on LinkedIn

Thanks for reading.

Bianca Hu – Delightful’s Digital Marketing Specialist

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