According to some recent statistics, the half-life of a pin is 3.5 months, meaning it takes a pin 3.5 months to get 50% of its engagement. The half life of a tweet is only 24 minutes and the half life of a Facebook post is only 90 minutes. This means that the half-life of a Pinterest pin is 1,680 times longer than a Facebook post. That’s pretty amazing.
Pinterest is one of our favorite personal social networks (and a massive time suck). This year, we decided to focus some extra attention on our Pinterest business account as an experiment (and not to goof off… really). Our strategy was was two-fold.
1. Create pins to promote our blog posts and resources on our site, in addition to quote images designed for sharing.
2. Curate a lot of useful pins and resources – organized by topic. These came from Pinterest itself, as well as direct sharing on other sites.
So far, we’ve got nearly 40 different boards going! We also actively contribute pins to 15 different group boards.
If you’d like to connect with us, you can follow all our boards at: pinterest.com/tlcforcoaches
Some of our more popular boards include Mastering Social Media, Growing Your Business, Quotes & Inspiration, Life Coaching, Mastering Pinterest, Productivity, and Marketing Your Business.
We also started a Coach Blogs Group Board to specifically showcase blogs written by coaches. Group boards on Pinterest are boards where multiple people contribute pins. There are group boards as small as 2 people and as big as 30,000+. Group boards are great for promoting your own pins to a larger audience. This is especially useful if you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of followers. When you leverage group boards correctly, you don’t need to rely on having followers right off the bat to get people viewing and sharing your pins. If you’re a coach and would like to pin links to your blog posts on our group for extra promotion and networking, get in touch for an invite! You can view and follow that board at: https://www.pinterest.com/tlcforcoaches/coach-blogs
Another one of our popular boards is Shareable Quotes – which is full of beautiful quote images our team has created specifically for Pinterest and Instagram. If you’re struggling to come up with visual quotes on a regular basis, go ahead and grab these! You can share them directly by simply hitting Save in Pinterest, or modify them with your own URL/branding if you’d like. We add new images there on a regular basis, so follow us to get them first!
https://www.pinterest.com/tlcforcoaches/shareable-quotes
This board is particularly interesting for us. It has been reported that up to 80% of the pins you see on Pinterest are repins. Given all of the beautiful images and useful information that can be found on Pinterest its easy to see why the percentage is so high. However, this means that only 20% are new pins – which is a great opportunity to grow your blog or business on the platform by simply providing great content. We’ve had some decent share counts on our own pins, and especially with our quote images. Each one of those are linked back to our Pinterest account and web site, which has resulted in some increased traffic to both our Pinterest profile with new followers, and our website.
Cool. Not massive numbers, but a nice slow and steady growth nonetheless. We’re looking forward to seeing where those numbers are 6-12 months from now – especially our repins. There are lots of pins on the platform from years ago that are still going strong today, so your pins can literally last for years and become a steady source of traffic to your web site, blog posts, freebie, coaching special, et al. Summer 2018 Update: We’re now up to over 27,000 “total repins”, over 1000 “followers”, and nearly 500k in “monthly viewers” (a new Pinterest stat now visible on business profiles). Not too shabby!
So how’d we do it? Putting in some work is part of it – especially if you are creating pinnable images for your own content – but those can be streamlined with templates or outsourced to a virtual assistant. You’ll also want to plan how you want to organize and brand your boards. We started out with a few boards and it grew from there. Not too long ago we decided to put cover images on our boards to make them stand out, and give the whole thing a more uniform look that was more in line with our logo and colors. It also created a nice separation between our own boards and the group boards we’re a part of, which are displayed on the same page.
Additionally, you can build your boards quickly and easily by utilizing an 80/20 rule of thumb. Pin 80% of existing pins you like on Pinterest that fit your board topics, and use the remaining 20% for your own promotional pins. We used that method ourselves, and also saved a lot of time by using some great Pinterest tools.
Our favorite Pinterest helper tool is Tailwind. This awesome app has played a big part in being able to curate so many useful pins, as well as share our own content quickly and easily. It also allowed us to schedule pins out over days and weeks at a time. The result was our boards growing at a steady rate and filling up with daily pins that we pre-approved ahead of time – even when we weren’t on Pinterest manually pinning anything (although we did that, too from time to time). The best part is it really didn’t seem like a chore; you can literally go through and schedule 5, 10, 20 pins for the next week while you’re having breakfast or sitting in a waiting room to see your doctor. If you use the Pinterest app or site itself, you’re basically pinning stuff right then and there. When you’re on the Tailwind site or in the app, you’re adding pins into your queue to be posted later to your Pinterest account – automatically at times specified in your settings.
You can also connect your Instagram to Tailwind and pull your images from there to use as pins. That alone can be a goldmine of content for those already active on that platform. The analytics on your pins are fantastic if you want to track which are doing great (and which ones aren’t). The bulk uploader / scheduler is also a great time saver if you have a lot of your own pins, as Pinterest only lets you upload one image at a time. This really came in handy on our Shareable Quotes board, where we could upload dozens of images from our computer at once to use as pins. From there each pin just needed a description and they were off into the queue a few minutes later. We really credit Tailwind for taking our Pinterest account to another level. It works quietly in the background while we tend to other things, like servicing our clients.
Try Tailwind FREE for 30 Days with a $15 credit!So, if you haven’t already, get on Pinterest and start pinning! Use tools such as the ones above to leverage your time and automate where it makes sense. Build your brand (or yourself), and most importantly, have fun doing it.
If you’d like to connect with us, you can follow all our boards at pinterest.com/tlcforcoaches
You may also like:
The Art of Being Shareable: How to Get More Social Shares (and Love from Google)
Free Pinterest Group Board Tracker
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