About 70 million people, mostly women ages 25-44, use Pinterest. This is great news because this demographic is the primary target audience for most photographers! Here are the best tools I’ve found to help photographers create awesome Pins and manage their Pinterest workflow.
Canva
Canva is great for all types of visual design tasks, especially creating Pinterest Graphics. They offer many helpful templates to help you create pin-worthy graphics.
Ideas for Canva:
- Create a Pin of your homepage and add it as the cover for a Board about your website, galleries, or blog posts
- Create Pinnable images to include in your blog posts
Tips for using Canva
One popular thing to share on your Pinterest boards is quotations. Canva gives an easy way to make good-looking images from text or quotes and share them as Pins.
Text on an image makes it more Pinnable since users often scroll through Pinterest images without reading the Pin descriptions. Canva is faster than Photoshop editing (at least for me). Ideas creating quote pins using Canva:
- Create a Board for customer testimonials and write their raves on top of a photo from their session
- Create a Board for inspirational quotes that uses your photography in the background of your favorite sayings
- Add text to the featured image of your blog posts so users know what the post is about without having to read the Pin description
Stencil
getstencil.com
Turn images or text into viral, eye-catching micro-content that you can share in seconds. This applet allows you to create picture quotes on the fly from any webpage, including your own.
Photo credit: shareasimage.com
Ideas for Stencil:
- Create powerful marketing images like the ones above for Pinterest or your website
- Get a free publisher account and by pasting a few lines of code at the bottom of your website, users can create custom viral images from your site.
Woobox
woobox.com
Stream Pins into a tab on your Facebook page. See an example on my page. It’s an easy way to cross-promote your Pinterest profile to Facebook (thus worth doing), but it will get buried on Facebook as a tab/app so people may not see it.
Pinvolve
Created by photographer Christopher Wilson, Pinvolve connects Pinterest to Facebook. This is similar to WooBox (above) but in addition to the Facebook tab, you can send Facebook posts and Pins back and forth between social profiles.
Ideas for Pinvolve:
- Automatically pull in your latest pins on Pinterest, Instagram photos, and Facebook posts and displays them beautifully on your Facebook page.
- Automatically post Pins to your Facebook business page.
- Convert your Facebook posts to Pins.
WiseStamp
wisestamp.com
WiseStamp adds a Follow on Pinterest button to your email signature, a simple way to increase exposure to your Pinterest page.
Pinterest Widget Builder
business.pinterest.com/
Manually place Pinterest widgets on your website.
Ideas for Pinterest Widgets:
- Place a Pin It Button below an image on a blog post or on the About page of your website. Tip – you can hack this widget to grab a Pin It URL and use the link in an email.
- Add a Follow Button to the right sidebar or footer of your website, your About page, and Contact page.
- Embed a Pin Widget within a webpage or blog post to get more people to re-Pin it. This would work well if you’re having a sale or a contest.
- Use a Pinterest Profile Widget to get more people to follow you, as I do in the right sidebar of this page!
- Use a Board Widget in a page or post to get more people to follow a board. This would work well for a What to Wear post or Local Vendors post.
Pinterest Pin It Button for Images
wordpress.org/plugins/pinterest-pin-it-button-for-images
This WordPress plugin displays a Pin It button on your blog photos when visitors hover their mouse on the photo. This is a great way to add the Pin It button everywhere whereas the widgets above are for one-off manual placement.
SocialShareIcons
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-social-media-plus
If you don’t like having separate plugins for Facebook share buttons and Pin It buttons, this WordPress combines them together into one. Choose from 16 designs and have flexible control over the placement on your page.
Tailwind
tailwindapp.com
Tailwind is a free Pinterest analytics tool with some amazing insights.
Ideas for Tailwind:
- Set up email preferences to receive alerts when there is a spike in Pinterest activity for your profile (so you can quickly respond or engage).
- Monitor activity over time to understand the growth of your Pinterest account.
Pinterest Analytics
business.pinterest.com
Pinterest web analytics can help you understand how Pinners are engaging with the content from your site. Metrics include Pins, Pinners, Re-Pins, Impressions, Reach, Clicks and Visitors.
To use analytics, you first need a Business Page and a verified website. You can convert your existing page to a Business Page.
Once you’ve verified, you can get to your analytics by clicking your name at the top of Pinterest, then clicking Analytics.
Pin It Browser Button
about.pinterest.com
Don’t forget a browser button so you can quickly Pin awesome stuff as you find it. I’ve tried a number of alternative browser plugins, but still like this Pinterest-created one the best.
Using Pinterest to Grow Your Business
Learn how to drive sales online using Pinterest in the Using Pinterest to Grow Your Business course from CreativeLive.
The Course includes tips, tools, ideas & strategies such as:
- Creating a presence you can be proud to promote
- Resource boards to attract new clients
- Content strategies for Pins to get more traffic and engagement
- Create pins that grab attention
- Tools to streamline your Pinterest workflow
- Use analytics to evaluate how much Pinterest is worth to your business
Once complete, you’ll have a killer Pinterest presence you will be proud to promote with increased exposure on the hottest social network.
