How to Share Pins on Pinterest to Create a Following for Your Brand

By Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond from Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Sometimes it may be most beneficial to your social marketing campaign to share other people’s pins. What to share isn’t a decision to take lightly. If you repin only the most popular pins, pins that everyone on Pinterest has already seen ad nausea, you’re not giving any incentive for folks to follow you.

If you share only obvious sales ploys, people are going to consider you to be a spammer. However, if you’re known as someone who posts interesting, intriguing, shareable content, you’ll have followers galore.

What sort of things you should share depends on your goal with Pinterest, the type of business you run, and who your customers are. Consider your brand and your message, and then brainstorm unique ways to share your brand’s story. Before posting anything, ask yourself, “Is this image representative of my brand?”

Here are a few things to consider:

Make your content shareable. Find images people will enjoy and talk about.
Images should appeal to the senses. Make them mouth-watering, thought provoking, funny, or the stuff that inspires fantasy.
People prefer images to text. Funny sayings and infographics are fun from time to time, but they can get old if that’s all you post.

If you run a product-based company, consider putting a price tag on some of the items you sell, which places the items in the Gifts section.

When share another person’s pin in your feed, you repin it. Similar to a Facebook share or Twitter retweet, a repin tells the original pinner you liked what she posted so much, you also wanted to share.

To repin a pin that you like, take these steps:

Hover your mouse pointer on the pin that you want to share and click the Repin button.

It’s the first button in the bar and it shows two pushpins.

A window pops up with the pin. The comments section automatically populates with what the original pinner wrote.
From the Boards drop-down list, select the board you want to repin the image to.

You have the option to select a board you already have or create a new board.
If you want to change the description, you may do so at this time.

If it’s helpful information, such as the name of a particular food dish, leave it as is. You can change the description to suit your community or leave the original description.
Click the Pin It button.

The pin gets added to the board you selected, and it shows up in your feed and in the feeds of all the people who follow your board.