Pinteresting Tips for Business OSP Episode 028

(Click the play button above to listen to the podcast)

In this week’s episode of the podcast I share tips and tools to help you with your business Pinterest account that will:

Impact what you see in your Pinterest feed
Save you time
Help you build connections with other people on Pinterest

Your Pinterest feed

For a few week Pinterest has been leaving cookies. I’m not talking chocolate chip or sugar cookies but the kind that track your activity on the internet. They’re using this information to help determine what you see in your Pinterest feed. This is good when you’re using Pinterest for fun. You’ll see content related to your interests in your Pinterest feed but when using it for your business, not so much.

As a business owner, you want to see Pinterest in its purest form to monitor what is trending within the Pinterest community. You don’t want your personal or business internet activity to influence what you see on Pinterest.

You can disable this feature. To do so, go to your account settings and select “no” for personalization. Remember to save your settings before leaving that page.

At the time of writing this post, I found that the setting to “no” did not always save. When I checked my account through out the day it would automatically switch back to “yes.” I hope this is just a glitch in the system that is resolved soon. Be sure to keep an eye on this for your account.

Save time with Feedly

Feedly is an RSS reader that can help you save time on Pinterest. One of the great features of the service is that you can categorize the content you find though your Feedly reader by tagging it.

You can create tags that represent your Pinterest boards. When you need fresh content to pin to your boards through out the week, you have an organized selection to choose from.

Currently, tagging can only be done on the web version of the service. If you use the mobile app you can “save it” and tag it from the web version when you get back to your computer.

Connect with others on Pinterest

Similar to Twitter, you can @ mention someone on Pinterest. This can be a handy feature when you want to let someone know you’ve pinned their content.

In the example below, I know Leslie Samuel from Become a Blogger has a Pinterest account. He has a great article on his blog that I pinned to my Pinterest blogging board. To let him know that I really appreciated the content and pinned it to my account, I mentioned him in the pin description. The @ mention becomes a clickable link to his Pinterest account.

As with Twitter, Leslie will get a notification that I mentioned him. Depending on his account settings, he could get an email too.

When @ mentioning someone on Pinterest you will get a list of people you follow to select from as you start typing their name.

If you’d like to @mention someone that doesn’t appear on your list use their username not their account name. For example, to @ mention me, you would put @cynthiapins not @Cynthia Sanchez. There are many accounts with the same name but usernames are unique. To find an account’s user name simply look at the search bar of your browser while on their Pinterest account.