Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Pinterest

What’s Pinterest all about?

It’s a highly visual platform. You aggregate together various visuals from online, and ‘pin’ them to various boards. These can be original content, or content you find elsewhere. Or you can ‘repin’ others’ pins to your own board. Don’t worry about crediting between pin boards as Pinterest does that for you. 

By far, the biggest user base for Pinterest is women. Why? Because the format is ideal for interior decorating, fashion inspiration, recipes, and wedding planning. This does not mean that there are no straight men on Pinterest. There are! But the audience is overwhelmingly female. Demographics also skew to over age 35 as the majority. 

Remember our buyer personae? If your readers are mainly female (or maybe you want to try to attract female readers – there’s an idea), then promoting your work on Pinterest is a very good idea. 

It does not all have to be fluffy romances or comedies. It can be any genre you like. But you need visuals. And, I might add, if Pinterest can’t find a visual to grab onto from a page, it won’t pin the page. Hence you’ll need to revisit your visuals, making sure you have good images and they are varied. The same three images of flowers, no matter how lovely, are going to get old awfully fast.

Making a Pin Board

Pinterest is pretty intuitive. This is not the place for long, drawn-out text. This is visuals. Upload and place into the appropriate board. Make a new board and fill it. Lather, rinse, repeat. There is a pin utility that works with Internet Explorer (it doesn’t seem to work with Chrome, and I haven’t tried it on other browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox) which is helpful but not strictly necessary. 

Pinterest provides a few ready-made boards, which you can use, or not, as you wish. As you get used to the platform, you will likely find that you want to move pins around or share them on more than one board, and you’ll probably try your hand at things like creating new boards or changing the covers. Experiment; Pinterest is hard to get wrong. 

Getting Pinterest Wrong

So far as I’m concerned, there are exactly two ways to do Pinterest wrong.

1.       Put up lousy pictures that are unclear or are NSFW or

2.        Don’t use Pinterest

It really is that easy.

Does it Work?

My own personal jury is still out. Like with every other social media platform, it’s all about the conversation, and about sharing and fostering a give and take. Hence if you don’t repin others’ works, you won’t be ‘wrong’, but you’re also not very likely to be popular. So give and take, and be sure to give propers to other people’s pins, by repinning or at least liking their pins. Remember and practice the Rule of Thirds.

Men on Pinterest

They do exist, although their numbers are low. Where do they go? What do they pin? 

For men on Pinterest, they may be looking for images for their own blogs or YouTube videos or the like. They might be looking for recipes that are easy to fix. They might be interested in images of celebrities, or of technology that they want to buy. Or they could be looking at or for the same things that women on Pinterest are hunting for. 

You may find that lurking for a while does you some good. Search for your genre, and see what’s being pinned in that area. For example, let’s say your genre is historical fiction. You might find pins about historical fashions, older books, etc. Check out who’s repinning that content, and who’s adding to it. 

Create your own boards, and keep them lively, and see what happens. 

Of course the link is to da puppy on Pinterest. The image is just a little graphic about Pinterest. The YouTube video is a decent tutorial on how to set up Pinterest. 

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