How to get started with Pinterest as a freelance designer?

In the world of social media, people tend to focus on the biggest platform, which would be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or TikTok. However, designers looking to promote their work and getting inspired by others’ work should seriously consider using Pinterest. In this article, we take a deeper look at Pinterest and the (good) reasons to use it as a freelance designer or artist. At Designer Daily, we have used Pinterest quite successfuly and grew our account beyond expectation (follow us here). On the other hand, we also run the WordPress Expert company’s account on Pinterest and it has a harder time progressing, with very few followers at the time of writing this (why don’t you follow it there?).

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine where users can save and share images, videos, and ideas. It’s ideal for finding inspiration, planning projects, and discovering new interests. The platform allows users to create boards to organize their pins and follow other users to discover new content. Pinterest is known for its highly engaged community and ability to drive traffic to websites.

How to use Pinterest for inspiration?

Before anything else, Pinterest is an image board. That core functionality is clearly what works best for, as it allows you to discover and classify visual information very quickly. There are several ways to make the best of Pinterest to find inspiration and organize it for your projects.

• Browser extension: install a browser extension to Pin images from other websites. This way, what you save is not limited to what’s already on the platform. On top of that, adding new content to the platform turns you in a more interesting content creator for Pinterest.
• Create boards: don’t be shy when creating boards, you can have many boards and it will not impact your profile. What I would suggest is to have general boards for inspiration, classified by category, for example “logos, illustration, icons,…”. You can also create project-based boards, for example if you’d like to design a vintage poster, have a board dedicated to your research on that project.
• Group boards: if you are looking to connect with other Pinterest users on specific topics, that’s the best place to find them on the platform. To find relevant group boards, you can check out tools like Pingroupie.
• Follow Pinterest influencers: most often, influencers have a lot of followers for a good reason, they publish interesting things. To find influencers in your niche on Pinterest, just do some searches with keywords or hashtags in the search bar. Browser the results and check who published the most interesting content, then follow them if they have a lot of followers and seem to publish good content.

Growing your Pinterest account

While you are using Pinterest to find inspiration, the level of activity you have there should help you grow the account and get visibility this way, but there are a few things you could do to ensure more rapid and sustainable growth:

• Find your existing contacts: obvious tip first, look for your existing contacts to invite them to become contacts on Pinterest. To do this, go to your Pinterest settings on your phone, select “Privacy and data” and enable the option “Sync your contacts”.
• Make your profile easy to find and attractive: don’t be lazy, fill your profile information seriously, with a good description that uses keywords that make it easy to find your. On top of that, create an attractive profile picture and header. People are more likely to follow you if your profile looks professional.
• Claim your website: it will prove that you are the owner of your website and give you an extra boost on your content’s visibility on Pinterest.
• Engage with others: it’s called a “social” network for a reason. While the pinboard features are great, you don’t experience the full range of Pinterest’s capabilities if you don’t interact, comment, or repost other people’s content. On top of that, this is the best way to get noticed by others, which gives you further chances to be followed back by them.
• Participate in group boards: group boards are the other social component of Pinterest, participe in it in order to get more visibility for your content in relevant Pinterest group boards.

As you can see from the above bullet list, growing an account on Pinterest isn’t all that complicated, but it does take some time and effort. Most importantly, don’t give up, be regular and persistent in your efforts.

Promoting your work on Pinterest

While you grow your account, you can regularly use Pinterest to promote your work and gain traffic from it. As a freelance designer, Pinterest is an excellent platform choice as it’s mostly visual in nature.

• Create specific images for your Pinterest posts.
  Your images should be high-quality and attractive in order to entice users to click and go to your website. Don’t forget, vertical images tend to perform better on Pinterest.
• Make your website Pinterest-friendly.
  In the beginning, you will not have much Pinterest traffic, but you may have Pinterest users coming to your website through other sources. Encourage them to share your image content on Pinterest through the Pin it button. Check out this tutorial to see how to install it.
• Add Open Graph metadata to enable the Rich Pins feature.
  This way, when people share content using an URL from your website, Pinterest (and other social networks) will be able to get information about your posts.
• Optimize your pins (and boards) for SEO.
  Pinterest search is also often used by other users to discover content, so you should make sure the right keywords are used in your titles, descriptions, image alts and related keywords so they are easily findable. This is a good way to make your content more popular if it ends up near the top of search results. On top of that, it will give a little boost to your website SEO, as Pinterest is very well indexed on Google.
• Regularly publish your content on Pinterest.
  Social media is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. You will need to be consistent if you want to succeed.
• Track your performance using Pinterest’s analytics dashboard.
  Don’t obsess over stats, as they will grow gradually, but don’t forget to check it from time to time and analyze what content performs better and for what reason. Try to adjust and improve the new content published on Pinterest to improve your performance.

Conclusion

As with most social media marketing, Pinterest growth and promotion takes a lot of time and effort. It can be very rewarding if you do it well and consistently, so stop waiting and take action.