62 of 365: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Audience (book chapter as serial post, part 4)

Please visit part 1, part 2 and part 3 to read the rest of the chapter so far.

How does one use Pinterest?

fig 07 – architecture search results

Searching – the search engine in Pinterest is a fantastic starting point to help build a board. If you are looking to develop conversations about your vast bicycling historical artifacts collection, maybe start with a search on vintage bicycles. By searching on topics, keywords, and tags from your ILS collection in Pinterest, you’ll be able to find pinners with like minds, boards related to your topics, individual pins that speak to your collection, and sources to gather more visual information for new pins.

Research – Once you add a pin and it is part of your curation in a board, the pin gives you other resources such as the person who pinned it (who may be a source of other related pins and worth following), other pins from the domain where it was pinned from (which you can bookmark in your browser), and other boards containing the pin (which may be existing collections similar to the one you are building). Finding like-minded pinners and organizations on Pinterest is a large part of the power of Pinterest as a social network. You connect, share, and learn through imagery.

Discussions – the point of social media is to engage, and discussion is a great way to do that. Great pins spark great discussions, and can be a place for you to develop deeper or different relationships with real or virtual patrons. If you are followed by and follow patrons on Pinterest, you may even get to the point where you share pins individually between them and the library, which strengthens that relationship, but also potentially grows the understanding of your brand and theirs.

Collaboration – Pinterest makes it easy to invite people to curate together. If you’ve ever wanted a low-threshold way to bring staff together around a topic, invite patrons to develop programming in a low-risk way, or invite an untapped demographic to engage with your library, Pinterest’s group boards may be a great way to do that. Create a board about Children’s Services, Emerging Technologies, Technology Programming, Learning Resources, or other topics to begin to show your interest in those topics.

Curation – Pinterest is a platform for curation, collection, organization, citation, classification, and review. That should all make perfect sense to a librarian. You can use Pinterest as a second catalog, but one that catalogs everything that your library does and cares about, not just the assets.

fig 07.5 – more from lemasney.com

Campaigns and Programming – if the main way that you are marketing your events and programming is via paper fliers inside your library, consider just pinning those fliers (in digital form) to a programming board or boards as a way of seeing if it increases awareness and participation. If discussions, repins, likes, and follows happen, that would be great too.