How To Get Started on Pinterest

Pinterest is the phenomenon that is taking the internet by storm. It is an interactive social networking platform that allows you to grab images from your favorite websites and "pin" them onto your personalized boards. You can follow all of a user’s boards, or you can follow select boards. Either way, it is a great way to share your content (and even to promote your brand). Getting started on Pinterest is easy.

Warning: it’s the most addictive social networking site you’ll ever start using.

Registering Your Account

Pinterest requires you to "be invited" in order to register an account. You can either submit your email address, and they will send you an official invitation within a few days (or at least a week) OR you can ask a friend to invite you and you can sign up automatically. Either way it makes certain that the people who sign up actually want to sign up, and it makes Pinterest seem like an exclusive online club.

Installing the Bookmarklet

Ingenious! Pinterest offers a bookmarklet (a button that you install to your bookmarks bar) so that you can easily grab images from websites that you are browsing. Pinterest will also not recognize images or videos from "preview" pages (web pages within a website like bloglovin’ or StumbleUpon).If you are browsing on StumbleUpon or other popular web-surfing sites, you need to remove the "stumbleupon.com" part of the URL and refresh before you can pin an image from that page (otherwise Pinterest will not recognize the image).

Creating Your Boards

You pin your photos to your boards as a way to organize and make them easy for people to follow you. While they do give you standard boards with standard titles ("My Style," "Travel," etc.), it is highly recommended that you make creative titles of your own. You also sort your boards by category so that people browsing different boards will be able to categorize your pins.

Start Pinning

Ready, set, pin! When you pin, you select a category and add a clever caption. It is recommended that you are consistent with your style when adding captions. Like any other social media platform, a consistent tone is key (you want to stay consistent with syntax, vocabulary, and style!).

Promoting Yourself

Pinterest is a great way to promote yourself and your brand. A lot of fashion companies and food companies use Pinterest as a visual way to show off their products. You can also drive traffic to your own personal blog via Pinterest because each image grabs the source URL from the page that it came from. It’s a great visual representation of the scope of the Internet that I personally hope continues to grow to all demographics.