Using Pinterest

[Dockerills]

I was wondering if there is anyone here who considers themselves expert on Pinterest.

For a long while I couldn't see how I could make use of the site but the potential is gradually becoming clear to me.

If anyone has a few moments I wouldn't mind some constructive criticism on my own Pinterest efforts so far. There are also one or two questions I wouldn't mind finding the answers to.

[elpereles]

Some topics in the forum about Pinterest:

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=34621

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=31279

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=34906

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=32266

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=34547

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=34326

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=34086

[MoonwishesStore]

While not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I do quite well with Pinterest and currently have over 7000 followers I got 1000 new followers already this month and last month I think they featured something of mine and in one week I jumped over 1000 followers! The more the merrier is my motto and I do get sales through Pinterest.

I'd be happy to answer questions here on the board if I can for everyone's learning (no PMs please asking for individual help-I won't answer them). If you have a question others may have that same question as well. Of course, I may not know the answer to your questions, but then someone else might. If you have read all the links that Elperles posted and still have questions, ask away. If you didn't read the posts first then do that and if you still have questions, ask. Post your pinterest account please if a question involves someone actually eyeballing your boards.

[Dockerills]

Hello Moonwishes. I have indeed looked at all of those links. I think it was your long posts on the third thread down that first got me thinking a few weeks back. Although I'm still a beginner I believe I've now advanced beyond anything mentioned on the other threads. I've also spent some time reading various blogs etc. that are pinned on to Pinterest itself.

You have an impressive number of followers, I have seventeen so far. If you can get thousands of followers you probably qualify as an expert. I'd certainly like to know how you did it!

Don't panic, a discussion on the forum is exactly what I was after.

Actually I was hoping to use Pinterest, blog and ecrater store in combination. The blog has been going for some time and gets a reasonable amount of traffic, the Pinterest boards are fairly new, the store is beginning to fill up. A critique of what I'm trying to do might be very helpful. It might also provide a useful 'blueprint' for other, especially those who fall into, what you might call, the expert niche seller category).

[MoonwishesStore]

I use Pinterest, my blog, G+, Facebook (somewhat), and twitter just because when I pin something they send it to Twitter as well. I have found that the day after I list new product I go through pinning, G+ing, etc. I wait that 24 hours since it sometimes takes some time for our photos to stop being temporary here and I don't want to send a link with a 'pizza box'. I have an advantage that all my patterns have numbers on them and many times the numbers are repeated across all the different pattern categories, so if I sell something, and anything else with that number gets tweaked here at ecrater. Many can always have a little something done, some need major things done as I am still finding rarely (now) boilerplate, etc. So that keeps my listings fresh here, and then I pin them, G+ etc. I have over 8000 things in inventory and unless I use some type of system I won't get anything done.

I have more things to mention, but I need to go to bed. Post your pinterest link, so I/we can see what you are up to there. I love Pinterest and I think that is part of my success with it. I've been on Face book twice as long and have 129 likes--big whoop, and one order via FB. ????Once I got over 10 orders via Pinterest, I lost track. My number of followers essentially doubled in the last two months. It is like a snowball, once you get it going right and the snow keeps falling, it gets bigger and bigger!

[Dockerills]

Hello again, sorry to be so slow to reply.

Just trying to work out what I wanted to say in as few words as possible.

Just to let you know where I've got to I'll give you a brief account.

I first thought of 'recycling' my auction pictures to generate traffic four or five years ago (selling on eBid at the time). Basically I thought that if I assembled all the pictures of items I'd sold in one place I could come up with a useful reference/gallery for collectors in the areas that I specialise in. I tried Flickr first and it worked well. People found my photostream and often followed my links to see what else I'd got for sale. The problem was that Flickr didn't like it and stopped it.

Second try, I set up a blog (on vintage tin toys http://tinplatetoys.blogspot.co.uk/) and a Picassa gallery (now Google+) to run along side it. It works well in terms of providing people with information, not so well in terms of refering people to my listings. I've put a few pictures down the side of the blog showing items I have for sale on ecrater but that's about it. To give you some idea of the interest in the material I provide have a look at this item in the gallery https://picasaweb.google.com/103785251805492468121/DOCKERILLSTINTOYREFERENCE#5667868544373537410. It's a sketch I made of a toy trademark. if you look towards the bottom of the page you will see that it has had nearly 40,000 hits. A new picture added to the gallery will generally get upto 600 hits in a couple of weeks. To be honest I'm not quite sure how so many people find the gallery because the pictures don't seem to be added to Google images etc.

Now, third try, I've started with pinterest here http://www.pinterest.com/kdockerill/vintage-tin-toys/ . I have to admitt that I find some aspects of the site a little odd, like not being able to really organise your picures. Anyway see what you think.

[MoonwishesStore]

Well I haven't been to the forum for the last couple days. I don't have a clue where the time goes! Anyhow, I have been looking at your Pinterest pages. I would encourage you to remember you can have as many boards as you want. So instead of putting all tin toys for instance in one board, you could have Japanese Tin toys, German Tin toys, Russian Tin toys, etc, You also seem to have duplicated photos of products some views coming from ecrater and then others of the same thing from Picasa. Unless you have the ability to sell on Picasa (I'm not familiar with Picasa) I would only show Picasa pictures of items that are sold. Anything that you still have in your possession to sell should be from ecrater (or any other site you are selling on). You want anyone that is interested to be able to go to your store site, learn about the product and BUY it!

Even if you get a sale here I would also suggest that you don't delete the actual listing, but put a blurb at the top of the listing saying it is sold, but you are welcome to read about the product and learn, and check out the rest of your store. However you want to write the blurb. By not deleting the listing, it will remain live on the internet and so if someone sees the photo(s) on Pinterest they will be able to always have a direct link back to your ecrater store. So even they can't buy that particular thing they may see something else they want and when the sale is made, you will see that the order came via Pinterest and that is a great feeling.

You can adjust your boards positions to the things that you feel are the most important for your followers to see. I think you can also do alphabetical order I wouldn't suggest that though. Because I wanted my followers to think of me as more than a pattern seller but as someone that loves the needle-arts, I have my hand embroidery board in first place, followed by quilting boards, boards with my sewing projects and then my patterns and then others boards about all sorts of things. I think I'm up to about 90 boards at this point. They all get looked at. I just started a new board last week as part of a McCall's pattern company contest, not trying for the prize although I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm looking for more traffic to my boards and then to my store where they can buy that sewing pattern that is now out of print. Of course the patterns shown (we had to feature at least 5 from their umbrella company) are all ones I have up for sale and are linked back to my ecrater store and some of them have already been repinned. Something we always want to see

One of the things that I did when I first started at Pinterest, was I followed everyone that followed me. When I pinned something from somewhere else I would get suggestions for another place to follow. If it looked interesting I would. You may also want to feature a board of books that are good for research, and don't be afraid to feature things that are your hobby if it is different than the toys. A board of photos of the places where the toys were made. I think a toy company from my area was a big one Marx Toys I think it was called. If these are your big hobby, think about how has that spread into other areas that you want to know about. things like the Japan toy marks. You could have a board just about the marks and then also features those same photos and links on the Japan tin toys. You could have a board just for airplanes, cars, etc. so there are several possible boards you could have the same thing pinned to. And don't above all feel like you have to limit how many things you pin daily. there are days I pin a lot because I have the time and might repin 100 things. When I try to pin my patterns, I do break it up with pinning some others pins and then go back to pinning my stuff again. The more followers you have and the more people you follow, the more things show up on your stuff that Pinterest send you to see. When I sign in directly to Pinterest I see different things than what you would because our interests are different. You also don't have to follow ALL of a persons boards. Sometimes there are only 1-2 that you like, so follow them. Gradually as you keep busy your follower count will grow.

Pinterest has just made some changes and I haven't had time to check them all out yet. My favorite time is when I am to tired to think or read and I will open up one of my boards and look at the different things that I had pinned previously and go see the site if I want to. Just last week doing that I found the best hand embroidery tutorial site that I have ever seen. Better than any 10 books that I have read on the topic so when I have time, I have been visiting that blog. I think we have to remember that Pinterest is not just a place to advertise but a site to learn and grow and see what others are doing.

[thelivesandlovesofmaggiethecat]

Several days ago I got a follower who seemed to specialize in weight reduction programs. I didn't follow her back. A little later I got another follower from someone with identical boards. Then more and more followers with the same boards. I sent an email to pinterest about it and they stopped cold. Of course all other new follows stopped as well.

I'm finding pinterest to be a waste of time. In order to make it work for you you really need to spend an incredible amount of time browsing and pinning. If I give in to it first thing I know I've spent the whole evening or afternoon on pinterest.

[MoonwishesStore]

It can grab you and soon you realize you forgot to eat supper. I try to pin things throughout the week, but actually spending 'me' time on Pinterest, I usually do on Friday evening. Or late at night when I don't want to go to bed.

I have found the Pinterest team to be quite reasonable when you ask for help. Not sure why you got 'spammed' on Pinterest, but I have had the same thing once a long while ago. Multiple pins of the same things by 5-6 different pin accounts. Wish I could remember what I did to get rid of them. But things like this I have found to be rare. the thing to remember unless you make your pins open to anyone to pin on, none of those nonsense pins will show on your page. they are just annoying within your Pinterest feed of pins you might be interested in.

My time to do the promotions to Pinterest maybe takes 1-2 hours a week tops. Since I have gotten orders via Pinterest I think it is worth it and as I have said before, I like Pinterest for me and would be using it even if I couldn't use it as a business marketing site.

[Dockerills]

[MoonwishesStore]

Glad to have been of help.

I don't usually use hash tags although I hear that they make your keywords more searchable. I think my problem is it slows me down. I entered a McCall's Pinterest contest last week and all the pins for that board had to two specific hash tags, some I put them in my notepad and copied and pasted them. Many people don't bother to even write any kind of description on their pins. They just put a period in the comment box and Pinterest allows it. I try to make a comment on those, or add comments when pinning a photo. I guess I'm to 'old-fashioned' in my writings to put a hash tag in front of a particular words every time I write them. To me it interfers with the flow of the comment. But yes, your comments should have a hash tag especially your sorts of things that you are really trying to get people to see some unique old toys.

Yes I love the fact that we can put things on more than one board. I had a pattern the I just listed and could stick it on ecrater in only one category. When I pinned it, I put it in it's normal category and because McCall's claimed it could also be used for maternity wear, I pinned it to my maternity board as well so two seperate sets of eyes might see that pattern. I think for you and your inventory it should work really well.

Many people I've noticed have some arbitrary number in their head that when they have a certain amount of pins under one board, will start a new board so as not to make someone need to look at a board with 7000+ pins on it. So if you feel that one of your boards has gotten too full (I would suggest over 500 or a thousand), just start another board of the same thing and even you can call it the same thing with Part 2 in the name. I think I have a couple of boards that I should start secondary boards for them but just haven't gotten around to doing it. Always way too much to do!

[thelivesandlovesofmaggiethecat]

A few days ago I pinned a cat picture to one of my boards. It may be the most popular picture on Pinterest right now. I've been getting about 20 repins, likes or follows a day from it.

[MoonwishesStore]

Well people do like their cat pix

[Dockerills]

Hi Moonwishes

I was just wondering if you'd seen a slowdown in the activity on Pinterest. I'm slightly puzzled myself. I've expanded the number of both pins and boards. I did collect a few more followers (including some from this forum) but then everything went dead. No repins either. It's just odd that more effort should produce less result.

[elpereles]

It happens. It is slow for some days and then boom 1 or more users repins stuff like crazy.