I struggled a lot when I first started managing the Pinterest account for Digital Photography School.
I knew that I wanted to focus on visual curation, and that I wanted to provide a comprehensive overview of techniques and tools. There were so many possible boards I could create and I didn’t know what was the best tactic or idea. Should I spin this topic off into a separate board? Should I avoid creating this board altogether?
Then I accidentally stumbled across the concept of a Pinterest persona. My partner and myself are amateur photographers and I found myself asking whether I would be interested in the content that I was pinning. If it didn’t seem relevant then I wouldn’t pin it. This saved me so much time when making decisions and has allowed the DPS brand to maintain a very consistent focus.
It’s what today’s Challenge is all about.
Image by SebastianDooris, licensed under Creative Commons
What is a Pinterest persona?
A Pinterest persona is simply a description of the type of person you are targeting with your Pinterest account. This is very similar to the concept of a blog persona. The difference is that Pinterest users have a different level of savvy and you want different behaviour from different groups.
Darren has previously written about creating reader profiles/personas to help with your blogging and identified the many benefits:
- It personalizes the blogging experience.
- It informs my writing.
- It identifies opportunities.
- It can be helpful for recruiting advertisers.
- It identifies ways to connect with your readership.
- It will identify opportunities to monetize your blog.
I recommend that you check out that article and see the type of profiles he created for Digital Photography School readers. I adapted these for my Pinterest Personas, and you can adapt them for yours, too.
Your persona description should include information about:
- how people discover your boards
- why they repin certain types of pins
- why they use Pinterest in general
- what inspires them to leave comments
- why they like a pin.
I recommend you wait at least a month after starting your Pinterest account before creating personas.
How can you create a persona?
What creating a pinning persona, ask what actions you want people to take when they visit your Pinterest account.
Read this article at the Social@Ogilvy blog. It helps you figure out how your users differ from your blog’s profile. The author recommends that you answer three key questions:
- How does the person behave in social media?
- Who influences the users in social media?
- How will the users engage with the brand or branded content?
You can figure this out by monitoring the types of people that currently interact with your profile. You will notice different behaviours for different types of people. You can then create profiles based around these.
You may notice their needs are different than you thought they were. You may also notice that your Pinterest account isn’t currently meeting their needs. This is fine—it’s all part of the normal Pinterest learning curve.
Your challenge
Your challenge is to create two or three profiles based around the types of people that your Pinterest account is targeting. These won’t be set in stone—instead, they will evolve as you learn more about your followers.
Your next step is to evaluate your Pinterest account and see if you are meeting the needs of these types of people. Be objective. If you’re not serving all of them well, what can you do to better cater to your followers? What changes will you have to make to your Pinterest workflow to accommodate them?
Over to you
Do you have social personas to help you with your account? Are you having any trouble creating them? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see how I can help you.
Interesting article! How would you recommend learning how users find our boards, and other than stalking each person individually, studying users’ behavior in social media?
Thanks for sharing!
Nowadays Pinterest is one of the best ways to get high quality traffic, anyways another great article.
This morning I heard a news report that Pinterest is much more popular with females than it is with males.
Have you noticed this with your interaction on Pinterest? How has this affected your strategy?
I think Pinterest is totally underutilized by bloggers and marketers. It is an excellent way to reach out to your targeted market.
does anybody have real proof or evidence that pintrest is actually driving new unique users to their website by adding regular posts?
As I’ve studied my website analytics I’ve seen that about 20% of my traffic is coming from Pinterest. Now, it is interesting to dig deeper… the pinterest traffic only visits 1.18 pages on average. The traffic that comes from my blogs will visit between 7 and 10 pages each. Traffic that comes from other social media is somewhere in between.
So blog traffic brings people who are interested in my topics (real estate) and Pinterest traffic brings people who might be curious about the picture…
All-in-all, traffic is traffic. And I only craft about 1 or 2 blog posts a month with pictures that I intend to Pin.
Thank’s for writing the article on Pinterest persona’s.
I new that my boards were more about non Business and causes than conversions as I added more content. My take away from article is what ever your good at and love, should be your focus.
After awhile like minded people should be growing your network and boards.
Use your time so that it shows on your over all online presence.
http://pinterest.com/BrianRBaird
Thank’s Brian
I am really new to pinterest. Do you think it is a good way for not just sharing pictures but inviting people to join my site to see more pics there?
I think making persona is a great way to understand your user base rather than getting unwanted followers (I call them creepers) just to increase your follower count. Although it looks good to have great number of followers but people waste a lot of time acquiring them when they should be using good techniques such as one you listed.
I will admit to being totally lost about my business being on Pinterest. I know the bent here is subtlety and not as direct
promotion as I am used to on other social media. Help, please.
I am new with pinterest. Just looking for the info about it.
Thanks for the sharing.
I have been using Pinterest pretty much since the beginning and while I’ve certainly seen some traffic from there I really think I need a new strategy to continuing growing my “community.” I’ve tried to be intentional about who to follow and yet there are too many days I visit and find 36 pins of recipes – too boring even for me to spend time there. I like the concept of a persona; similar to creating an avatar but with more depth. Thanks for the inspiration!
I use pinterest for some time,but not very deep-going,thanks for this article.
Really interesting post. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of stats yet for Pinterest, so I’m very curious to see what kind of results people see with strategy. What’s the reasoning behind waiting a month after account creation? Gain following first? Set up enough content?
Jade,
I think this is exactly why some businesses soar above others on Pinterest — they don’t get the idea of holistic marketing that moves out of their narrow product niche. It’s about looking at the interests of their customers, just like you said.
Great article,
Melissa
http://pinterest.com/melissa_taylor2/
This is nice lesson to learn, I’m still new on pinterest. I don’t understand pinterest but try to know it fast.
From what I know of pinterest, I think certain products do well like cosmetics, lifestyle, gardening, food, shoes, clothes etc…commercial products…like I have a blog on art, culture and spirituality.. I haven’t really received a good response from Pinterest.