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Hi KeePers,
Let me start this out with an admission. I frankly do not like social media. I groan at the millions of totally senseless posts, hide my face at the barely worthwhile posts, and fear getting sucked out of productive work and turned into a mailbox.
So I’ve never tried to use social media as a marketing tool, because, duh, it would be a painful way to market.
But, I’ve decided not to say no to it until I’ve thought it through more.
The social media site that’s always interested me is Pinterest. Why? Well, because its mostly females on there and females are the ones who generally write books and read them. Probably not a very educated reason for being drawn to Pinterest, but there you go.
So if anyone has used or plans to use Pinterest in any sort of promotional fashion, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Do you have to design your own graphics? Is it time intensive? How has it worked for you?
Tagging people who might know something about this. @hope @anne-of-lothlorien @graciegirl @kate-flournoy @rolena-hatfield
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@daeus I’ve only used Pinterest with a personal account, and not one for promotional purposes, but I can say I find it very easy to use. You wouldn’t need a banner like a lot of websites, just something for your profile picture. You can upload pins directly onto the website (and I believe you can still add a link to it) or you can pin directly from *your* website. You’d need to design any images you plan to use for that. But I’d agree, that a lot of writers/authors/readers use it, so I think it’s a very useful tool for promotion. Dunno if this was helpful, but I hope you figure it out! 🙂
(also, I groan at most social media as well. But I like Pinterest, as it’s easy to filter out things you don’t have any interest in seeing.)And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.
@Daeus uh… this reminds me that I was going to set up a board for my blog articles and I… totally forgot… XD
Honestly, I’m not a Pinterest regular. I have two storyboards (and three others that I share with @Hope ) and that’s it. I’ve been slowly picking up on how others use it for promotional purposes, but so far I’ve mostly used it as a convenient place to put inspiration, prompts, or articles I want to remember. Kind of like Trello, only more… aesthetic-y.
I think the main thing in using it for promotion though would be to get added to the boards of others. If you look at the bottom of KP’s Pinterest page, you’ll see several boards that belong to lots and lots of people, not just one. Those are like communities all condensed around one board, and therefore the things in that board get seen and shared by a lot of people at once.
The nice thing about Pinterest for promotional purposes is that people go there actively looking for things they like, and all it takes is one click and your pin will instantly be at the fingertips of all the other followers of whoever pinned it. It’s a constantly multiplying process.
@daeus I personally love Pinterest and its the only form of social media (apart from my blog) which I currently use. I only use it for personal stuff though, not for marketing or promotion. However, I found this article which seems to have a lot of good info on the topic
34 Strategic Ways You Can Use Pinterest to Market Your Book and Your Author Brand
A lot of people will pin their blog headers on Pinterest with a link to the article, that’s the most obvious form of promotion I’ve seen on there.
I have seen statistics saying that 80% of Pinterest users are female, so if your novel appeals to women it would definitely be a good platform. If it doesn’t, maybe not.
I hope this was helpful!
INFP Queen of the Kingdom commander of an army of origami cranes and a sabre from Babylon.
@daeus well it did a nifty thing with my link!
INFP Queen of the Kingdom commander of an army of origami cranes and a sabre from Babylon.
@introvert_girl @kate-flournoy @seekjustice
Thanks for your replies!
So, I’ve read and listened to some stuff about Pinterest and I think if there is a social media site that would fit me, this would probably be it. I think I’ll probably give it a try, but before I commit to anything I like to have a strategy for how I’m going to use it.
I have a basic idea and I wanted to see if you thought it was reasonable.
The one thing I do not want to do is start a blog and write a bunch of articles just so I can pin them. Are you crazy! (Not you, anyone who would do that) I can’t afford to spend that much time writing stuff outside of my novel.
So what I want to do is have 1-5ish pages all my pins would link to.
Here’s what that could look like. Let’s say I start a board for the characters in my story. In a year, I might post a lot of things on there, but almost all the links would lead to a page where people could learn more about my story and subscribe to make sure they get notified when the book comes out.
Would it look bad to use the same link over and over again? And If I do this, I actually was thinking about having boards for characters, but I don’t know if that’s the type of content other people are interested in. Would they be?
And, yes, I’ll get on the site myself sometime this week, but I wanted to ask some experienced users too. 🙂
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@daeus – I have a friend who has a “board” called “storyboard: and then the name of her current book she’s writing” – She pins a lot of pictures (like of different scenes in her book, character portrayals, etc.)
I like your idea above about using boards for different characters and they all having the same link going back to your writing. 😀
I personally have Pinterest, but haven’t used it much for promotion purposes for my small business yet, although people have suggested it. I think it would be neat for you to give it a go and see what happens!
@daeus I see a lot of people who pin pictures for inspiration like that, especially characters. Though I don’t think you can pin someone else’s image and change what the pin links to. But you could probably copy paste a link to your blog in the description of the pin. (If that didn’t make sense I can try and explain it better, lol.) But I think that could work, especially if you were linking to a page about your story, or maybe a page with a description of the characters from your novel, like more details about their personality? That sounds like something I’d be interested in seeing.
And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.
@lifeofkatie Okay, thanks. That helps. I think I’m going to give it a try. 😀
@introvert_girl That makes sense, though I think I’ll create all my own pins.🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢
@daeus That’s even better!
And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.
@Daeus sounds good to me. 😛 Honestly I haven’t studied it as much as I should have. But from what I know of Pinterest, that’s a very solid plan.
@introvert_girl @lifeofkatie @seekjustice @kate-flournoy
Okay, unless anybody think’s it’s a terrible idea, I’m planning to use this for a writing school I’m launching this coming year.
My general impression of Pinterest leads me to think that quotes are good to post there, so I thought I’d do some short writing tip graphics. To make it easy on myself, I’m trying to get one really good basic design so all I’ll have to change is the text from here on out.
If you don’t mind, I’d love your opinion on the designs I’ve come up with so far: if you like them, ways to improve them, or different design ideas.
Here’s the options I’ve designed so far.
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@Daeus whooo, my eyes are crossing. 😛
None of these are particularly amazing in my very humble opinion, though I do think the second has potential. The biggest problem is the composition— there are no lines to define where graphic meets text, or to organize the whole thing for us so our eyes have to do as little bouncing around as possible.
One very simple, powerful fix would be to simply put a white box inside your graphic (leaving a ‘frame’ of sorts of the original graphic around it) and put the words in there.
@kate-flournoy True. I was going to do something like that, but I couldn’t figure out how, so…I didn’t do anything like that. 😛
But I can do some sort of border. I’ll play with it.
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@kate-flournoy Okay, here’s what that could look like with a border. The problem with borders is that I can’t find any that are adjustable, so I have to find one that’s just the right size and look. Looking at this, I think it would look better with a border that encompassed the whole lower half. I could get a different banner/plate for the top that would match the vintage style too.
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