~by Haley Lynn Gray~
The most useful thing to understand about Pinterest is that it behaves like a search engine rather than a social network.
People don’t go there to see what their friends are doing. They go there looking for something — how to organise a small kitchen, what to serve at a christening, how to plan a house move — and they search for it.
That single fact changes how you should use it.
What follows from that
Pins have a long life. A social post is finished within hours. A pin that answers a common question can still be bringing people to your site three years later, and it does it while you’re asleep. That’s a fundamentally different return on the effort.
Descriptions matter enormously. People find things by searching, so what you write on and around the pin determines whether anyone ever sees it. Write what someone would actually type.
And it rewards usefulness over personality. Elsewhere, being interesting works. Here, solving a specific problem works, because that’s what people arrived looking for.
How to set it up
Arrange your content into boards your ideal customer would actually want to follow. Not boards about your business — boards about the things they’re trying to work out.
Each pin needs an image that stands up on its own: vertical, clear, with readable text. People are scanning quickly, and an image that doesn’t explain itself gets passed over regardless of how good the underlying content is.
Then keep adding. This isn’t a set-and-leave platform — consistent new material is what keeps you visible and keeps followers arriving.
Use the calendar
This is where Pinterest is genuinely unusual, because people plan ahead there far more than on other platforms.
You can reorder boards by season, so what’s most relevant sits at the front.
If you’re an accountant, that means tax planning content toward the end of the calendar year and filing content in the first quarter. A wedding business leads with different things in January than in August. Anyone serving a seasonal need can simply rearrange the shop window.
Worth noting that people search for seasonal things considerably earlier than you’d expect — plan to be there before they start looking, not while they are.
Measure where clicks come from
Connect your analytics and use Pinterest’s own, and you’ll see which boards and which pins actually send people to your site.
That information is more valuable than follower numbers. Follower counts are frequently misleading on any platform and the counting methods change without warning. Clicks to your site don’t lie.
Who this actually works for
Honestly, because a lot of people waste months here.
It works well if what you do is visual, or if your customers plan ahead. Food, homes, events, crafts, clothing, travel, anything involving preparation. It also works for informational content that can be made visual — checklists, guides, comparisons.
It works poorly for business-to-business services with no visual element, and for urgent-need businesses. Nobody searches Pinterest when their pipes burst.
If your buyers are eleven procurement managers in your region, this is not your platform, however good your pins are. Be where they are instead.
The honest summary
Pinterest rewards the same thing everything else does: being genuinely useful, consistently, about something people are actually looking for.
Its particular advantage is that the work keeps paying long after you’ve done it — which makes it one of the better places to spend effort if your customers are there.
Check that first. Then commit properly or don’t bother.
More on writing content people search for.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
