By Reid Rosefelt
We define and display ourselves in social media through our taste. We show the books, movies, TV shows, theatre, music, technology, sports, food, and video games we like, and what we have to say about them. Pinterest does that, with the difference being that it’s not as evanescent as Facebook and Twitter. It’s not about what you said a minute or few hours ago, it’s relatively permanent. It’s a series of baskets–your boards–in which you place your interests. They are always there, you just keep putting more stuff in them.
Your boards are all dedicated to something specific or a theme. It could just be “Johnny Depp” or it could be “Actors.” I recommend that you make your boards more unique, with obsessions and themes that are personally interesting to you. The overall collection of boards on your page will form your larger portrait: if your interests are all over the place, your board will reflect that.
You are promoting your work, so you will be putting things that you made onto your boards. You will also be putting up things that you find on the web. However, whenever possible, it’s best to try to find a picture within Pinterest itself, instead of putting the same one up sourced to Google or Bing. Many people pay attention to who repins or likes their photos. That might indicate mutual interest, and a reason to follow them back.
Once you set up a new board, as I did the one at left a few days ago–the people who follow all your boards will see the pictures in their streams. Unfortunately, experienced Pinterest users don’t usually follow people, they follow boards, so it’s hard to get started with Pinterest. People on Pinterest are very finicky about which boards they choose to follow, even if they repin a lot of pictures from them.
As I wrote in last week’s blog, the secret to finding followers is through the search box. In fact there are those who believe that Pinterest is more about Search than “Social” and Buzzfeed even declared that Pinterest search was better than Google’s. If you have a diverse assortment of boards, you’ll get different kinds of people who are interested in each one. It would make sense that if you have a wide variety in your boards, you’ll get more people to follow you.
The search box should be your best Pinterest Pal, but it is very hard to figure out how it works. This is a subject that rarely comes up in discussions of Pinterest because most people haven’t tested it enough to notice the problems. One blogger that did threw up her hands and said she wasn’t sure if it wasn’t completely arbitrary. Here are some issues:
First, it’s not comprehensive—a search for “Steve Martin” won’t show you all the pictures of Steve Martin on Pinterest. My graphic of Steve Martin has fifty repins and is by far the most popular of the hundred graphics on my “Movie Actor Quotes” board. It should qualify to be indexed: it has “Steve Martin” in its description as well as in the name of the file. Despite this, the picture doesn’t come up in a search for “Steve Martin,” which yields dozens of pictures with only one or two repins, and none with over ten. Why?
It turns out that all the images in my “Movie Actor Quotes” board rarely come up in searches for their actors. This seems to be a set policy, one that’s either in the search engine’s code or through some kind of human intervention.
Now let’s do a search for “Movie Actor Quotes.”
This brings up all my graphics, followed by everybody else’s. That makes a certain kind of sense, because “movie actor quotes” is an extremely specific search. But Martin is ninth. The ones at the top of the page are neither the most popular or most recent. There’s no discernible rhyme or reason to it.
Let’s go back to the results page from a search for “Steve Martin” and check out the pictures at the top of the search. None of them are particularly popular, but it you click on the names of the people who uploaded them, they are very popular. Most of them have over a thousand followers and one, Rosalia Casas, has 23,000 followers. Casas has a lot of boards, many of which are “group” boards where strangers can also pin. Group boards are one of the ways that you can game Pinterest to have a ton of followers.
So this appears to be the secret to the Pinterest search engine: the more followers you have, the higher your pictures will be displayed in search results. This will lead to more followers. It’s only anecdotal evidence, but it least it provides a logical explanation when nothing else does.
If I’m right about this, the way I’ve been approaching Pinterest has been completely wrong for many months. I’ve been focusing on creating one or two awesome boards when I should have been focusing on diversity, quantity, and as many boards as possible.
I recently set up two boards: Social Media for Filmmakers and Social Media for Artists. My idea is to create the very best reference to the most interesting and up-to-date information about these two topics. Those two boards are going to be my main reason for using Pinterest, with a secondary importance for my boards with tips on Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Vine, etc. But to get the word out on these two boards, I’m going to make and maintain a lot of other ones. I’ll keep you posted with my progress. Please write to me with yours.
Next week I will move from more general thoughts about the Pinterest search engine to tips on how to increase the chances for individual pins to be indexed.
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
