Pins are images or videos that link back to a web page, such as a blog post or product. You can either upload an image from your computer or pin items from the internet using a Pinterest Bookmarklet, Pin It button, or a web link.

Benefits of being on Pinterest

For businesses and nonprofits, Pinterest gives you the opportunity to let your target audience find and share your products and services and drive traffic back to your website.

Organise your pins with boards

Boards let you organise your pins into groups. To improve the search engine optimisation of your boards so others can easily discover them, it’s important to add a description and select a relevant category. Boards can be public, which means they are open for all other users to see, or private, so only you and people you invite can see them. You can also create group boards that let several people collaborate on a board.

Discover and be discovered

As well as saving your own pins, you can also use Pinterest as a search engine to find other people’s pins. You can either search for something specific with keywords or get inspiration by selecting from one of the 34 categories.

Like most social networks, Pinterest allows users to follow one another, which means you’ll see all their boards and pins in your feed. Or you can choose to only follow specific boards if you don't want to see everything. Following someone increases the chances they'll follow you back. It also gives you opportunity to comment, like, and re-pin their images and increase your engagement with them.

Essentials for creating click-worthy pins

Pin a variety of visual content and keep your target audience and their interests in mind. Include a mix of both your own pins and other people’s pins. The goal is to tell a visual story and let visitors know that if they follow you they’ll learn more about the things that interest them.

Optimise pins for visual impact

All pins have the same width but an unlimited length. Take advantage of this structure by posting pins that are taller (portrait) as users tend to re-pin these more often than wider (landscape) pins. To pin non-visual content like a blog post, use an image from the post, and overlay the title or a quote from the blog over the image and then pin it. You can easily achieve this using free online tools like Canva.

Check links before re-pinning

It’s a good idea to click through on each pin you want to share before re-pinning it to see where the link goes. You want to make sure that it’s a high quality link that goes where you think it should.

Find out more about Pinterest

There are two types of Pinterest accounts – Pinterest for personal use, and Pinterest for business - you can find out more on Pinterest.