Guest Post: Three Pinteresting Tips

I am very excited to have my first guest blog post from Kaitlin Walukonis,

an Assistant Account Coordinator at Van Eperen & Company. 

Posting, liking, tweeting – and now – pinning! If your organization isn’t pinning and repinning, it may be time to get with it and join Pinterest.

The Public Relations Society of America National Capital Chapter recently hosted an event focusing on social media trends for 2013. Denise Graveline, a consultant at Don’t Get Caught and Anthony Shop, managing director of Social Driver, shared their opinions and knowledge of these trends to public relations professionals at the U.S. Navy Memorial & Heritage Center. Both experts stressed the importance of visuals and the social media platform Pinterest, which can help attract your audiences and direct them to your website blog and other social media pages.

Pinterest – previously explained by Laura Van Eperen in our Spring 2012 Newsletter – is a social media platform that allows users to create pinboards, a web-version of a bulletin board and pin or repin photos and videos of anything that interests them (hence the name Pinterest). Pinterest is the third largest social media platform, trailing only Facebook and Twitter and is the fastest growing social media network. According to this Mashable article, Pinterest is now almost as popular as Twitter. Based on Graveline and Shop’s discussion, here are three great tips for using Pinterest within an organization.

1. Pin visuals from your blog.
People don’t want to read a block of boring black and white text – they want visuals. Incorporating visuals into your blog posts will not only attract more readers but it will also allow you to pin these visuals to a pinboard. Pinterest users can then repin your visuals, passing along your organization’s news. Graveline gained a lot of traffic to her blog because of her Pinterest account. This brings us to the next tip.

2. Don’t be a one-way pinner.
You have to show loVE to get loVE (VE & Co.-style love). Follow other bloggers and pinners, interact with them and share their information on your pinboards. This will make them much more likely to reciprocate. As Shop puts it: “Social media is like a cocktail party,” meaning you have to mingle with other professionals on social media networks for your information to be seen and shared.

3. Incorporate your organization’s personality.
Social media platforms can be fun! While it’s important to share your organization’s news, be sure to incorporate some personality while doing so. Van Eperen and Company’s Pinterest account shares news and blog posts, but it also includes a pinboard on business casual attire.

Now, go pin and repin. Be sure to think about what unique pinboards your organization can create to demonstrate its personality.

 

 

About Kaitlin: Kaitlin, a dance fanatic and undercover-balloon-animal-maker, provides strategic communications, media relations and event coordination support for corporate, non-profit, government and entrepreneurial clients as an Assistant Account Coordinator with Van Eperen & Company. Kaitlin earned her B.A. in Communication, Public Relations from the University of Maryland, College Park in May 2012

Tagged: Blogs, Guest Blogger, Kaitlin Walukonis, Organizations, Personality, Pinboards, Pinterest, PRSA, Repins, Social Media, Van Eperen & Company, Visuals