Pinterest is a virtual pinboard…sort of like a bulletin board with images. When you come across an interesting image, photograph, video, article or anything that catches your fancy, you can “pin it” to your Pinterest account. What you get is a colorful collage of images which can be categorized into individual boards. Being a social network, you can freely exchange your “pins” with friends and family who are on Pinterest. Leave comments and start conversations around the “pins”. Pinterest is currently invitation only. That does not mean it’s for the select few. Ask someone who is on it for an invite or sign-up for one yourself. I got my entry within 24 hours.
Pinterest is Dead-simple to Use
The appeal of Pinterest is in its user-friendliness. There are two ways you can use to create your boards:
- Use the Pin It bookmarklet to pin anything you like to your board.
- Search Pinterest and other boards – repin what you like to your board. For instance, you can search (say, Google Image Search) for travel photos (places you would like to visit) and pin it. Alternatively, you can use the search feature to grab images from someone else’s board to repin them to your own.
How to Use Pinterest for Content Curation?
The above two ways outline the speed and ease of collecting content and bunching them up in neat categories. Because Pinterest is a more “visual” social medium from others like Twitter and Facebook, the quality of what you pin will determine the quality of your pinboards (and the followers you attract). Pinterest gives you the clean clutter free whitespace to populate with relevant visual images. Let’s take the example of my board on travel destinations I have planned out for the future: The content has been curated from travel sites, Google Image Search, Flickr, and repin-ed from others with a similar taste in travel. This “vision board” is a basic example of explaining your desires and dreams using visual imagery on Pinterest. You can extend this by planning your vacation on Pinterest – pick up photos of the places you are planning to go to and construct a visual brochure on a Pinterest board. Scope for content curation is vast because you are only limited by ideas. Here’s a snapshot of the categories you can explore. Of course, you can go much beyond what’s mentioned here. Innovative uses for exploiting Pinterest are cropping up – for e.g. known and obscure brands are using pinboards as a branding vehicle. Take a look at General Electric’s pinboard or the one from Volkswagen. The simplicity of Pinterest does not take away anything from the fact that images can effectively tell stories on their own. What’s your take on Pinterest? If you had to use it for content curation, what would your boards be on? The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
