Pinterest for Authors

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Pinterest is a great social media tool for introverts. It's less social than many other platforms.

What I love about Pinterest:

Any post can be seen by all users
In other social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook etc, only your followers can see your posts. Pinterest is unique because it's basically a huge search engine for pulling information. (More about "push" and "pull" later.)

Posts have a long shelf life
I started Pinterest years ago and people still "repin" my posts. Shelf life of Twitter is a few seconds, IG and Facebook are a little bit longer, but the staying power of Pinterest is unbeatable.

Archival
Everything can (must be!) be categorized and stored for Pinterest to work. That's good news for those creating pins. They last and are easy to find.

Media
You can use all sorts of different media: movies gifs, jpegs, images, recipes etc. in your pins

Use to discover and save new ideas and link back to URL
 Each pin can link back to its URL. Your description can be #keyword rich.

Pull v. Push method of advertising
People come to Pinterest to find something. You don't have to push your advertising on them. If you add value (more on that later) they will come to you.

It's free
Pinterest is free to use. It costs nothing to create pins.

Now that you're sold on the idea of marketing on Pinterest, you need to know how to get started.

Step one: Create a business profile. It's free.
If you have not done so change your profile to business. Click here for directions.

Step two: Create a pin.
I use Canva. If you are interested in me doing a quick video tutorial, let me know in the comments and I can get one up on how to create pins using free software. There's also picMonkey and other sites, but I use Canva. 

Step two-point-five: Create value.
This is the creative part. Create a pin that not only displays your lovely book cover, but also give them something of value so that your pin will not just be admired, but it will be cherished, valued and most importantly, repinned.

What is value? I started making pins that have my book cover on them in addition to other useful things: a funny/ fitting quote, a recipe or tips. In order for people to come to you for information, you must give them something to "pull" some bit of expertise, something people will want to save. Otherwise, you are just "pushing" like every other social media platform out there.

Ask yourself: what am I an expert in? What tips can I share? What useful piece of information will help my readers, be of interest to my readers? Then slap your book cover, your website and a keyword rich description on it and send it out into the world. (See my example I created on the fly here) complete with graphic!

Has this been helpful? Would you like me to go into more depth?
What tips would you like to share?

Comments

  1. Cadence April 18, 2019 at 2:12 PM

    Wow. I printed this off so I can use it as a reference. I'll play with Canva and see what I can create. But you might consider the video, I have a feeling there are a number of WRP authors that would appreciate it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AZApril 19, 2019 at 8:02 AM

    Okay, I'll see if I can get to it this week! I think this is an extremely helpful tool! Good luck!

    ReplyDelete

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