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3 Pinterest Best Practices That Every Community Manager Should Know

Aishwarya Krishnamurthy

Pinterest is no longer just a place to find recipes or DIY projects. Brands across industries are now jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon to capitalize on the booming popularity of the image curating platform. With 1/3rd of women in the US reportedly using Pinterest, there’s a lot at stake and brands need to truly understand how best to use the social network for their objectives.

In the same way that there are ‘Best Practices’ for Facebook and Twitter, we’ve rounded up a few tips to help you shine on Pinterest.

Promotion Boards:

Pinterest, unlike Facebook and Twitter, helps you bring together similarly themed posts. This means that it’s not hard to find what you’re looking for when you head to a brand’s profile. For example, if you want to find the Spring-Summer 2014 collection at Tory Burch, that material has already been curated. Similarly, themed boards are also put together periodically, like Nordstrom’s Fashion Week board. However, this can lead to an overpopulation of boards. We found one brand that had found an efficient way of increasing engagement as well as keeping their profiles free of out-dated boards.

Australian brand Intrepid Travel organized a “Polar Travel Sale”, a time-constrained promotion of travel deals, and created an eponymous board, as well as a Polar Adventure Travel board.


Both boards engaged well on Pinterest, but after the time period of the sale, the brand simply deleted the Sale board. By doing this, they avoided confusing users with out-of-date offers and kept their profile relevant and clean.

Tip 1: Pinterest Boards don’t need to be permanent. By deleting time constrained boards and periodically clearing clutter, potential subscribers will see relevant and timeless content, instead of being distracted by a Sale or Offer that is no longer valid.

Hashtag Usage:

It should be noted that hashtags on Pinterest don’t work on the same lines as on other social networks like Twitter and Instagram. When you search for a hashtag, the results aren’t limited to only pins that are specifically tagged with that hashtag. So when you search for the hashtag #summerfest, apart from pins using that hashtag, you also get pins where the word ‘summerfest’ is used, and pins that seem to have nothing to do with the word or the hashtag. It works almost the same as simply searching for the word ‘summerfest’ without the hashtag.

However, the benefit of using a hashtag in the description of a pin is that there is an easy click through from the hashtag on your pin, instead of having to carry out a separate search. For example, if a pinner came across a pin with the hashtag #GoPro, they can click on it to find other pictures by or featuring GoPro, with a single click of the hashtag.


Tip 2: Brands can create personalized hashtags that bring together all content relating to them, instead of joining a larger, more disjointed conversation. Using #Shoes will bring together too many brands, but #Anthropologie will showcase all #Anthropologie related pins only.

Likes, Re-pins and Followers:

In the Pinterest universe, Likes, Re-pins, and comments don’t necessarily have the same value as their equivalents on Twitter or Facebook. Likes and Re-pins are the main currency on Pinterest, the ‘comment’, while a valid form of engagement, doesn’t offer reach beyond the original pin, the way that Likes and Rep-ins do.

Even the concept of Followers is different. The follower number on a profile is an aggregation of the followers of each of the boards. In the example of Adobe, assuming that around 10,000 people have ‘followed all’ their boards, each board also has separate followers. Their Creative Inspiration board, which doesn’t highlight their work, but is still related to their services has 11,246 followers. However, they also have a Travel Bucket List board, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their product, but with 10,918 followers, has added about 900 new followers to their profile.


Tip 3: Pinterest is a great place to share your brand’s personality! By creating a board that features fan favorite content like quotes, pets or company culture, a brand can humanize its image while boosting its follower count and engagement.

These are just some of the many tips that we’ve found while parsing through brands on the Unmetric platform that can improve your Pinterest presence. If you have a favorite tip to add, let us know in the comments below. If you’d like to discover some Pinterest insights that matter to you, get a free trial on the Unmetric platform, complete with the beautiful new UI. Happy pinning!