By Reid Rosefelt
As I’ve said before, attempting to game social media is like trying to playing chess with a computer that can change the rules at will. Every social media guru is aware of this, as social media changes like the wind.
This is why I’m not interested in writing “[INSERT NUMBER HERE] THINGS YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT PINTEREST.” Rather than pretend to be an expert by recycling other people’s insights and research, I’d rather direct you to the original thinkers here.
More importantly, when you are dealing with something that is always changing, trusting experts isn’t always the best idea. I think you should be proactive–not just a passive receiver of other people’s ideas. I’d rather suggest a working process, instead of “tips.” I’m talking about curiosity and a willingness to make your own experiments. Curiosity has no expiration date, and the only answers that matter are the ones that work for you personally and in the moment.
Consider this blog a diary of my personal attempts to learn. When things don’t work, I try to figure out why and keep at it until I see progress.
When I first started using Pinterest, I noticed that many people were using Twitter-style hashtags. If you’re not a big social media user, hashtags are number signs attached to a word or a group of words, like “#pinterest.” When you search for “#pinterest” on Twitter, you will see tweets about Pinterest. Correspondingly, if you want to be seen when people are searching for Pinterest-related tweets, you attach your #Pinterest hashtag. You are very limited in how many hashtags you can use on Twitter because you have a 140 character limit, but with Pinterest the character limit 500, so people really went to town with hashtags.
Hashtags are meant to describe the “aboutness” of your content. It’s a way to add information to a post that might not be findable without that extra information. As you can imagine, they have special value for describing photos.
So I appended hashtags to my images and I didn’t seem to get anything out of them. I finally decided–I have no evidence– that Pinterest users don’t search with hashtags: they type “Steve Martin” and not #stevemartin. (This may be explained by the fact that a lot of Pinterest users have never used any other social media networks.) When I added a #stevemartin to my description of my picture, it didn’t appear in search result for “Steve Martin.” On the other hand, if I searched for “#stevemartin,” I got into a much briefer list that only included images with #stevemartin in their descriptions. As this is the wacky Pinterest search engine, there were also some pictures that didn’t have #stevemartin in their descriptions. But I don’t despair because I can’t figure everything out about the search engine. It doesn’t matter, really. If you put the hashtag #potato in your description and your picture comes up in a search for #potato, then that was worth doing. If not, try something else.
When I looked at what everybody was doing on Pinterest I saw that they tended to put in very brief descriptions. If you do a search for “Words to Live By,” you will get results of pictures with descriptions that only say “Words to Live By.” That’s the way it works with that particular search. Pinterest is more flexible with other things, but it’s good advice to start your description with the most important words. That’s why I started my descriptions of images from my “Movie Actor Quotes” board with the phrase– “Movie Actor Quotes.” I wanted to own that particular search. Not only did that work, but it worked on search engines like Google too. Then I thought, why don’t I add “Film Actor Quotes.” I switched to “Movie Actor Quote – [actor’s name] – Film Actor Quote,” and it came up on both searches.
There is no one -size-fits-all rule on any of this. After all, you’re an artist, not a “social media marketer.” You might not want to do many of the things that hardcore marketers do, and their techniques might not come off well within your community. In fact I question many social media marketing practices. For example, once they find success with a particular tactic such as using “calls to action,” they keep doing it long after many of their followers are sick of it, and the tactic has lost much of the efficacy it once had. How do you know when something isn’t working so well anymore? Because it annoys you when others overdo it.
I believe that searching for hashtags will become more popular in the future, because I discovered that a hashtag in Pinterest doubles as a link. If you click on #stevemartin in the description you get exactly the same result as when you type “#stevemartin” in the search box. In time, people will figure that out and that is bound to increase the use of hashtags in Pinterest.
Each time I do a description I end with two links: #topic and “reidrosefelt.com.” I never put any more than that because my experience is that it hasn’t helped. But your case could be completely different. Try using a lot of hashtags; maybe you’ll have better luck than me.
I leave you with two things. Pay attention! Keep experimenting!
Not bad advice whether you are online or offline. #payattention #keepexperimenting.
Reid Rosefelt coaches filmmakers in how to market their films using Facebook, and lectures frequently on the topic. His credits as a film publicist include “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and “Precious.”
Blog: reidrosefelt.com
