Earlier this month, I was chatting with some friends on Facebook about the clothes we were wearing that day (yes, people actually do that) when I had an idea. What if we created a board on Pinterest where we could share snapshots of our style every day for a designated period of time? We could even open the idea up to others so they could join in! I thought we could share pictures daily or as often as possible from New Year’s Eve throughout January. Fun idea, right?
Well, this proved to be more complicated than I initially anticipated … Before getting into that, here’s the BIG IDEA:
Project Style Share
If you love clothes, style and accessories: Project Style Share is for you! It’s a fun way to connect with others by sharing ideas and highlighting your personal style. The rules are simple, take a photo of your attire or an accessory & share it on Instagram (Type: #projectstyleshare in the description so we can find it and pin it to our “Project Style Share” board on Pinterest) beginning New Year’s Eve through January 31st. Post a picture daily or as you’re able!
Notice how I mentioned Instagram there? Well that’s because, as it turns out, Pinterest isn’t as easy to navigate as you’d think when it comes to hashtags and searching. At least, not for this sort of campaign. Here’s why:
- There isn’t a collaborative board option on Pinterest. Yes, they have secret boards but what about public boards? Sure, you can invite other pinners manually and grant them access to pin freely to your board if you follow them. However, if you’re trying to create a campaign that allows pinners to interact with each other on a central board, there isn’t really an uncomplicated option.
- Pinterest search is different. Whereas in Twitter and Instagram you can perform a search and find every mention of a particular hashtag or keyword, Pinterest ranks its pins and approaches search differently. Meaning, you can’t search by hashtags like #projectstyleshare and see everyone who used that hashtag. Instead, pin searches are ranked by how many times pines are repinned or liked. This poses a BIG problem when you want to find the content people are sharing or if they’re mentioning your brand by name.
So what did I do?
- After my research, I decided to turn this into an Instagram campaign because utilizing hashtags is incredibly simple in comparison. Friends I’ve manually added to the Project Style Share pinboard can pin automatically and I’ll add others photos as I see them on Instagram.
- However, there’s still problems with that option: Instagram doesn’t allow you to pin to Pinterest and vice versa.
- Que Pinstagram. I’ll use this handy-dandy program to automagically pin from Instagram to my board:
There you have it. There is a solution to every problem.
Want help creating a social media campaigns like this? Email me for a complimentary evaluation of your current social media presence.
This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog, KateUpdates.
~ Kate
