I also am becoming completely addicted to Pinterest…you can join me over there too! I’ve been pretty obsessed with it in the last few months as I started pinning things and exploring the community. And some pinners are using this new network in really cool ways too.
For those who’ve not yet familiar with Pinterest, the concept is pretty simple. When you sign up, you create “boards” – as many or few as you want. Each board has a certain theme, you can title them to whatever you like. When you come across something you like online and want to both remember (like a bookmark) and share with others, you can pin it to one of your boards. For example, I found these really cute cupcake cones and wanted to remember it for when I make food gifts for friends. So I pinned it to my “Gift Ideas” board.
- Pin your best blog posts
One of the boards I created is called “Favourite Blog Posts I’ve Written,” and my plan is to use it to pin my most favourite articles from this design blog and posts from my Missie Cindz food blog. This has the potential to get out of hand if bloggers use boards to promote every post they write, but with the correct restraint, I think it can bring you a lot of traffic. People have already started to follow that board, and as of writing this post, it only has four pins. So, not only is Pinterest a great way to share funny, cute pictures of what we’d like to fill our house with and whatnot, but it can also have practical uses for bloggers who aren’t working in visual-centric niches.
- Start a Pinterest book/food/crafts (whatever interests you) club
This is one board I’m hoping to start in the coming months – a little book club for me and others interested in reading the same books as me. Lots of people use Pinterest to share their favourite books, but what about creating a group board (where anyone can pin things) and every month reading a book together, using the board to share links to reviews and analysis, products inspired by the book, interviews with the author you’ve found, etc. When I read a book or magazine I like, I love to read as much about it as possible and share with others who are reading the same things, so Pinterest could give us a fun place to collaborate. Collaborative projects are defnitely the way forward.
- Share your screenshots on Pinterest
Another handy tip that I’ve found is that if you tend to share a lot of screenshots on Pinterest, the website Url2Pin.it gives users a pretty efficient way of getting it done quickly. Url2Pin.it is a free tool to help you share your interesting collection of websites on Pinterest – sharing a screenshot of your/the website and not just a single image – it’s a great way for Web designers to easily share their live work with their Pinterest followers. You simply enter the URL of the website you want to share, hit the Pinterest button on the right, and a pop up window will appear to choose the board and enter a description.
I am always interested in the male perspective for Pinterest especially because there appear to be far fewer males pinning than females… at least for the moment. It’d be good to know what male users who use Pinterest extensively think.
I will continue using this platform, pinning all things colourful and aww-ing; and explore what others are doing, I’m sure I’ll have even more neat ideas to add to this list. Have you come across anyone using Pinterest in a cool way? If so, tell me about it in the comments!