PINTEREST: A New Way to Market Your Arts

Pinterest can be an easy and very fun way for artists to market and promote their art to a growing audience of interested people.  It's a new social media platform that is visual in nature and content for all its participants.  

Think of Pinterest as your very own personal marketing bulletin board, open to the public where anything that you pin shows in a stream (much like a Facebook, Twitter or a Google+). People who like what you have pinned can take it and re-pin that image or post on their own board. As you post your pins or collect and post re-pins from other people, these pins can be put into separate boards for better classification, administration and better collective viewing.

The boards you create on Pinterest are related to your art and help to create interest in your other pins, posts and images. Pinterest is a community of people, who through the sharing of images that they like and find interesting, make it very easy to re-pin and share those images to others. The better the image, the more looks, likes and re-pins that the image will produce. The more that you are active on the site, the more you will get back from this platform, in terms of exposure.

Pinterest is already proving that it can drive a lot of traffic to an owner’s website.  Artists find that Pinterest is the perfect vehicle to post and showcase their art. The Pinterest platform makes it is very easy to accomplish this from the artist’s own website.  Pinterest  provides each member a “bookmarklet” for your browser and this bookmarklet takes you to your Pinterest page where an image can be posted to any of the topic boards that you have created. It will also allow you to provide a small description of what you are pinning, in order to help people understand what it is that you have pinned.  These descriptions of pins also help when people do a search on a subject.

Make sure that you not only stay active on the site, but also share, re-pin, like and comment on other’s images too. When you start out on Pinterest, do not post all of your art all at once as you will then lose the impact and the ability to attract more people to follow you. By spreading the posting of your art, you will be placing and presenting your art to different people, at different times, who in turn will re-pin and share that art to others as well.

NOTE:  Recently, copyright issues have been raised concerning the posting of other artist’s work.  This is the link to their terms of service for account users http://pinterest.com/about/terms.  When posting or pinning art other than your own, remember to always credit the artist and to have a link to their website.