So you guys have heard of Pinterest by now, right?  It’s recently become one of the top social networks. Click here if you’re not yet hip to the Pinterest vibe and from now on, do try to keep up with the new hotness. We can’t tell you about everything.

As you may have guessed, it hasn’t taken long for businesses to discover Pinterest and start realizing some of its potential. We here at GLAD WORKS are relatively new on the Pinterest journey, but we've learned so much in a short amount of time, we thought we’d share some of that wisdom with you. So far, it’s looking pretty swanky!

Form a Committee

First, we formed a Pinterest Committee. You can totally have a committee meeting with yourself if you don’t have a bunch of folks hanging around to talk about it with you. Just make sure you listen to yourself carefully and share all of your ideas with yourself. Remember there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Just…ones that are perhaps not fully cooked yet. And you might as well make yourself a nice cup of coffee too because you want to be on your game.

Strategize first

Before we even started an account, we came up with a strategy for what we wanted to get out of Pinterest. While pinning tons of doggie pictures and examples of cool typography has its appeal, it’s not going to get us very far. We have to have a strategy and stay focused on our goals to:

• Increase traffic to our website through SEO
• Create a place where we can share what inspires us
• Create a portfolio of our best work

Pinterest is a great place for us because we do a lot of “artsy” things that fit with Pinterest sensibilities. If you’re going to start a Pinterest page, make sure it’s actually appropriate for your business or you’ll risk being an uninteresting Pinterester. Say that three times fast…

If you’re an accounting firm, for example, Pinterest is probably not the place for you. But let’s say you make wedding cakes instead. In that case, Pinterest is the perfect place for you because Pinterest lives on pretty pictures of pretty things.

We’re excited about Pinterest because not only is it a good place for us to showcase our work and share our inspirations, but it can help us increase traffic to our website, improve our SEO, give us a place to network with other Pinteresters, and share our portfolio with colleagues and prospective clients. It’s important for us to know our goals and develop our strategy so we’re sure to get the most out of it that we can.

Once we got our strategy pinned down (see what we did there? Pinned down, Pinterest? Cleverness.) we started planning our boards.

Planning Boards

We decided that our main boards should include

• Design We Love
• Ads We Love
• Tech We Love
• Photography We Love
• Infographtastic!
• Memes!
• Typography is Sexy
• Our Photography
• Our Web Design
• Bella & Dolce (how could we leave out the GLAD WORKS puppies?)

Pinterest is a great place for us because we do a lot of “artsy” things that fit with Pinterest sensibilities. If you’re going to start a Pinterest page, make sure it’s actually appropriate for your business or you’ll risk being an uninteresting Pinterester. Say that three times fast…

If you’re an accounting firm, for example, Pinterest is probably not the place for you.

But let’s say you make wedding cakes instead. In that case, Pinterest is the perfect place for you because Pinterest lives on pretty pictures of pretty things.

Pinterest is also great if you want to increase traffic to your website, improve your SEO, share your portfolio, that sort of thing. It’s important to take those things into account during your strategizing phase so you’re sure to get it right in the doing phase.

Start Pinning Stuff!

We chose three people to be our main Pinterest Pinners. All three of them love Pinterest and enjoy using their personal accounts, so it was a natural choice to involve people who love doing it. We started pinning stuff that belongs both to us and to other people. It’s really important not to pin only our own work. In the Pinterest community, it’s considered kind of jerk-y to do that, so no matter how tempting it is, we’re not gonna go there. Besides, it’s really fun to share stuff we love with everyone. Pinterest is where we get to play and share what we’re passionate about. You can view what we’ve got so far right here. (PS: the ads we chose to pin are hi-larious! You’ll enjoy those.)

It’s starting to shape up pretty nicely, isn’t it?

Our plan for the future is put a “pin it” button on our blog, and to add more boards as we think of stuff that would be cool to pin, so make sure you visit us often to see how things are evolving.

And speaking of visitors…

Follow heavy hitters and people who re-pin your stuff

We don’t have a lot of followers and “likes” yet because we’re only just beginning. It’s just like with any other social media platform—it takes time to build a following. We’re hoping y’all can help us out wit that a little bit (FOLLOW US!)

To help us along the way to becoming Pinterest Superstars, we plan to find the heaviest hitters and follow them because when you follow popular pinners, and they follow you back, lots of their followers will follow them and then follow you (are you following all this?).

So that’s our Pinteresting plan, GLAD WORKS friends.

Are you following us?

Because you should. We’re gonna rock this thing.