Last updated February 21st, 2019 at 06:46 am
Hello, and thank you for reading (at least this much of) my chronicle of Day #3 of my 14 days exploring Pinterest.
Day 1 was my planning day. I announced my goal: to wade through the hype to find out whether and how businesses can actually use Pinterest to grow. I did log in and look around, but I mainly sketched out a plan.
Day 2 was meatier. I browsed, I searched. I drilled down into the few boards I was following at that point.
Today I divided my time (way more than the minimum 24 minutes I arbitrarily allocated to my daily Pinterest journeys, I might add) between the meta and the actual.
The Meta
By meta, I mean I did more research about Pinterest.
I read and scanned some articles that came up in my search results (428,000,000 of them!) when I searched for "Pinterest: I don’t get it…".
I joined the Pinterest Marketing Community on Google+ and read and scanned some articles recommended in that group’s discussions. (This looks like a good resource. Not large, which is good, and rules against gratuitious self-promotions. Check it out if you’re so inclined.)
I read about the SEO benefits of entering long-tail keywords as descriptions of pins and boards.
About how to optimize images on your blog so they’ll look good on Pinterest.
About how to find boards to follow.
About how to pin, how to add "Pin it" buttons to a Web site, and on and on.
But this was still all so meta, so academic. And, frankly, it was nothing new to me. I was itchy to act.
Walk the talk, man
What I hadn’t yet done was follow my own advice.
Whenever clients ask me how to get started with any social network, I have one quick answer: Join and start lurking. I tell them that the best (only?) way to be a producer of quality social media content is to first be a consumer of it.
So why haven’t I been following my own advice?
I immediately took the following steps:
- I followed the boards of all my Facebook friends who have Pinterest accounts. (Pinterest makes this easy to do if you link accounts.)
- I updated my iPhone Pinterest app, found my password, and logged in.
- I installed the Pinterest for Android app on my Samsung tablet. (It turns out that Pinterest works really nicely on the tablet. I’m sure it’s also swell on an iPad. Highly recommended.
- I activated the Pinterest "share" button on my blog’s Social Share plugin settings page.
By day’s end, I still hadn’t really followed my own advice yet.
But I shall.
Starting tomorrow.
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Jeff, I do hope you haven’t lost faith in your Pinter-quest! I read days 1, 2 and 3 with great anticipation, thinking, “Fantastic! Any day now he’s actually going to get to the meat of the matter and we’ll find out some interesting stuff about Pinterest!”
But I can’t find day 4 or any other day after that, which, considering day 3 was June 14th, is a bit disappointing. Surely you’re going to walk the talk and take your own advice, Jeff? I assumed 14 days of exploring Pinterest would run serially, not as an occasional thing. Loses the impact somewhat.
As a new Pinner myself, I was hoping that your insights would aid me in my own quest to get the best out of Pinterest without actually allowing it to eat my life. Don’t let me down!
Oh my goodness, Sue. Indeed, I have not walked the talk. Other work intervened, and, alas, I haven’t followed through. My intention WAS to chronicle the 14 days serially. And yes, the impact is somewhat (putting it mildly) lost. Perhaps I’ll make the time to resume my quest; I hope you’ll stay tuned in that event.
PS: In an odd way, it’s nice to know I disappointed someone. (I wasn’t sure anyone was listening.)