First Annual (Virtual) G+ Bloggers Conference - Pinterest - The Other Social Media

Hi there, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and we are here with our 9th session in the 1st Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference on Google+. So today we're here with Pinterest, the other social media, and if you're a food blogger, you know how much Pinterest means to us in terms of traffic. So we're going to have— we have some guests today and let's just go over from my side over to the far side. We have Cheryl Suzanne with us from Tidy Mom and she's going to talk about her experiences on Pinterest. Marla Meredith from Family Fresh Cooking and she's going to talk about it. And we have Valerie Kaufman who's going to share some infographics with you and she is from Feastie.com and she's got some other insights for us on how to use Pinterest. So we're going to get started. If you have questions, you can ask them in the comment bar and we will see them inside here through the comment tracker and we'll address them as we go. Okay, so just post your questions questions you have and we can answer them in between our session while we're doing the session or after we're done we will go into a full Q&A. So if you have your questions, get them ready. Alright, so I'm going to turn it over to Marla. Marla, go ahead and start us off.

Hi there, great to be here today. Pinterest has— I'm Marla Meredith from familyfreshcooking.com, you can see that on my little bar there. Pinterest has been a a wonderful tool for me, both to generate traffic to my blog and also for me to stay in touch with everything going on in the food, style, fashion, lifestyle, travel world. I'm a very visual thinker, so Pinterest being basically entirely photo-driven is my go-to source for everyday things. I post, I love to pin, repin, I love to find new trend-driven things on Pinterest. My readers really respond to that, or my viewers, whatever, followers over there, really respond to that. I pin a lot from my own blog to generate traffic, and then also people are constantly pinning my photos for my blog too. So I've seen the mo— the biggest traffic boost to my site has come from Pinterest for sure. And, uh, brands like to work with me when they see my high Pinterest numbers. They see that I'm a voice online. So that's been a great way for me to generate business as well. What else would you like to—

Well, how have you gotten to be so successful on Pinterest? How many followers do you have?

You know, I haven't checked today. I tend to get a few thousand a day, which I'm pretty grateful for. I think my count right now must be— it's over 300,000, probably like 330,000, 340,000. And it's funny because I came to the game real late in Pinterest. I was out there always begging for invites to it. I think at the beginning you had to have like a special invite and it took me well over a year, probably like a year and a half before I got my invite. So I came late to the game and I was obsessed with it immediately. And I don't know if it was obsession that drove numbers or sheer luck or what, but I've definitely become a trendsetter, pacemaker in the Pinterest game, which I'm incredibly grateful for. So I'm at it every day. I don't have a special time of the day that I pin. I pin when I can and it's actually very relaxing for me to do it. So when people say, "Gosh, you're on it a lot, girl," I say, "Well, it's just sort of a relaxation for me to do." And again, being that this is my job, social media and photography and blogging, it's a great place for me to get new ideas. So I want to be on there for business and pleasure as well.

Have you found that you get a lot of interaction from brands because of this? Are they coming to you?

Absolutely. They do, and I think some brands understand the importance of my numbers on there, and when they ask to work with me, it's a mutual understanding. Often my numbers are significantly greater than the brand's. So they'll come to me and say, "We have 12,000 fans on Pinterest and we could really benefit each other if we work together." And they often want that relationship for free. I said, "Well, that's funny." I have over 300,000 Pinterest followers. Um, my time is valuable, your time is valuable. If we want to create a mutually beneficial relationship, you're going to need to pay me for my time, especially if you want exposure on my blog and Pinterest. Um, because as we all know, we have become great advertising sources. We're probably becoming stronger than the magazines that are. Um, people respect our voices, trust our voices. So yes, brands come to me. Sometimes they clearly understand the relationship that I do indeed get paid for my job, and when they don't, I explain it to them. They can either move on or work with me. Just, you know, depends. But yes, they see my numbers and they generally find them fancy fun. They want to work with me because of it.

I would think so. Is there any advice you could give to someone starting out on how to be successful?

Yeah, I think what's really nice is like any other social media networks including— I'm kind of new to Google+, so try and make some friends. You know, meet like-minded people out there, follow boards that you are actually really interested in. That's the thing too, I don't follow everything. I follow things just really that are my interest. Repin their pins, comment on their pins sometimes, get out there and don't just repin but go to the source. Learn about the source you're pinning from. And like, let's say I'm going to Cheryl's site. I might spend, you know, 15 minutes there pinning everything I see because it interests me. So I'll actually spend time somewhere to get to know that site and to share it. I'm not sure if I just lost track there of what you asked me, but basically, yeah, if you want to, you know, start building a network number, don't even think about it as I want to build my numbers. Think of it as I want to build my friendships and my network. On a certain platform and then you'll see it just starts to evolve and grow. But you gotta share, you gotta share other people's stuff, not just your own in order to succeed. Be a trendsetter too, stick to your voice.

Very good advice. Okay, we're going to move over to Sheryl. Can you offer us some insights on how you use Pinterest and what you do, some tips?

Well, I'm Sheryl with TidyMom.net I started on Pinterest in very early 2011. I went back and I first wrote a post about it back in March 2011. Before that I was using Tumblr. I like to share a lot of other people's content. I was using Tumblr as an extension of my blog to be able to share stuff that I didn't have time and space to always be sharing on my own site. When I discovered Pinterest, it was another great place to be able to share all this other great content out there with my readers and stuff without consuming all the space on my blog and everything, but still great stuff that I wanted to share. Like Marla said, I think I'm on Pinterest a lot, but I feel like it's relaxing. I kind of enjoy it. I don't follow a ton of people and I don't follow a lot of what people are repinning. I don't repin a whole lot. I make a bunch of pins and I don't follow a lot of the bloggers and stuff that I follow or talk to. I mean, I do to some extent, but I feel like what I'm pinning on Pinterest is a much broader source than group that I'm usually tweeting with or sharing Facebook stuff with. I'm not saying I don't share their content on Pinterest, but I try to go out way past that on Pinterest. I don't tend to go to my Pinterest feed for who I'm following to look to see what I want to pin. When I do pin something, have you ever noticed, and they're getting better about this, about all the content that Pinterest is putting like If you pin something, it pops up and shows another board that this pin was pinned to. I'll click on that sometimes and look at somebody, you know, I have no idea who they are and see what else they've pinned. And I'll get lost in their Pinterest boards or when you pin something also way down at the bottom of that, there will be a lot of other similar pins and I'll go off and look at those. I try, I kind of get really lost and all of a sudden I'll have 6 tabs open of pins.

I can definitely agree with you that it is therapeutic, and you spending time on there, you just kind of get lost in what you're doing.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have that much time to read blogs anymore, so I feel like it's a way to kind of stay connected without spending as much time reading, because I do tend to, when I go visit a blog, a lot of times I don't have time to read it, so I just kind of skim the pictures and maybe, you know, if I have time to read a little bit So this way, Pinterest, you can kind of go on and see what everybody's been up to, you know, what they've been making, what they've been doing, and all this stuff that, you know, I don't even have on my, you know, reader. You know, a lot more stuff than what I'm normally following.

So, and it's still the same as any other social media, it's about engagement. Do you find yourself leaving more comments there too, or do you leave comments?

Yeah, I don't know, maybe that's why I like Pinterest so much because I don't worry about all that as much as you do on Facebook and Twitter and your blog and stuff. I do go in and check to see what people are pinning from mine, and I go to see how many times something I've pinned maybe has been repinned or something, but I don't worry too much about comments or anything when I'm on there. So maybe that just kind of takes some of the pressure off of all that.

Do you get comments? Do you answer comments when they're left for you if they're about a certain thing?

I do.

I do. The only ones I don't get, I have 2 group boards that are pretty active that have, you know, have a good-sized following on them, and I get comments all the time from people I don't know asking to be added to those boards, and I don't usually answer those. There are a few boards and they're kind of specifically for a certain group of people, so they're not like open to just anybody. So, but other than that, yeah, if I get questions about something, you know, I answer them. Yeah.

Great.

Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to move on to Valerie, and Valerie is going to share some infographics with her that she has. So it's all yours, Valerie. Oh, you're muted, Valerie. Can you unmute? Sorry.

Hmm, sorry about that. Okay, so yeah, I have a very different perspective from Cheryl and Marla, I'm actually not using Pinterest the same way everyone else is. In case anyone's not familiar with Feastie.com, we're a food blog search engine and we've indexed over 1,000 blogs and over 250,000 recipes and we use some of the social sharing stats for those to help rank some of the results, which means I have, you know, a ton of data on how many different recipes are— how different recipes are pinned and what the trends are in terms of what gets more pin counts. And so one of the infographics I have is an infographic from feastie.com, and I've posted this link in the event page as well as on my personal G+ page. And so one thing I know is that the top, top 10% of recipes have around 12,000 or more pins. The top 1% have 85,000 or more pins, and the top 0.1% are into the 300,000s. And what's interesting is that some of these really, really highly pinned recipes, they aren't necessarily from blogs that are, you know, extremely huge in terms of traffic. So it means that if you have, like, one really popular recipe it can be a huge game changer for your blog. I've broken it down by the different meal courses, and what was sort of surprising is that appetizers are the most likely to go viral, and by go viral I mean you're in that top, top few percent of pin counts. And so a lot of people think it's desserts, but it turns out that roughly a third 1/3 of all recipes published by bloggers are desserts, and there's a smaller supply and greater demand for appetizers. So appetizers, especially like cheesy dips, do very well. Also beverages and sandwiches do quite well. In terms of the types of, exact type of dish, cheesecake is one of the biggest winners, but also enchiladas. There's a lot of desserts here that we see are popular, chocolate cake, pretzels. Another trend is bite-sized things, so something that's miniature or a bite or something, that tends to get more pins than typical. Some of the most highly pinned ingredients include stevia is about twice as likely to go— anything with stevia is twice as likely to go viral. Actually, that's 3 times as likely to go viral because people like sweet things and they also I don't want the calories, so it's win-win with stevia. There's also a lot of cheese here is popular, marinara sauce, breadcrumbs, sprinkles, so sweet things, cheeses, and comfort food type of ingredients. And surprisingly, there's a few ingredients— a lot of people think that, oh, what's going to be most popular is what's unhealthy, but there are some, you know, fairly healthy ingredients here like quinoa, that are very popular: black beans, spinach, chicken breast. Another thing that we found is that based on the day of the week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday are sort of your best days. I think it's because a lot of people are doing a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, so you can sort of buck the trend to do a little bit better. And finally, Unsurprisingly, we found that portrait aspect ratio photos, the longer, narrower photos, are a lot more likely to go viral. If you're doing a short, flat photo, it doesn't get as much real estate on the screen in Pinterest. So it doesn't quite do as well. Okay, and all of those details are in my infographic that I shared. I also want to talk about an infographic from a company called Curalate, which specifically handles not food-specific, but various visual marketing platforms including Pinterest and Instagram. And they've done a sort of similar analysis on several, I mean, hundreds of thousands of different pins. And these aren't food-specific, but food is the number one category on Pinterest, so a lot of this has to do with food. And some of the things they found is that having multiple dominant colors is better. Having roughly like medium lightness is best, medium saturation. So something that has some color is a lot better than black and white. You are about twice as likely, 10 times more likely to go viral if you have color than if you are black and white. Certain hues, including like the warm hues like red, orange, brown, and pink, your photo's going to do better if you have those hues. About 30% of the area should be background, so if you're too tight or too far out, it doesn't do as well. And they also found that pins do better if they don't have a face, for whatever reason. Mm-hmm. Pins without a face do better. And last, I was just going to comment a little bit on like how to use Pinterest analytics. And personally, there's 4 tabs in Pinterest analytics. Personally, I find the first 2 are not that useful. You can look at that graph and it looks nice to see your numbers going up. If they're going up, you know, you're probably doing something right. But in terms of using that analytics for making a real decision, something you can do to help drive those numbers up. The later two tabs, the most repinned and most clicked tabs, tend to be, I believe they are a little more useful. You can see what's trending right now. Maybe you want to go cross-reference, cross-promote that onto Facebook. If it's trending on Pinterest, maybe it will trend on Facebook. If it's an old recipe that suddenly getting popular, promote it on all your other channels as well.

Very good, great. That's— oh, I'm not— I thought I was muted. Okay, that's some great information. We do have some questions here, and Kirsten Mattis, I think we touched on it a little bit, but she says, "How should I get started on Pinterest?" Alright, so if you're starting from fresh and there's nothing going on, anything she should be doing from the get-go? Any suggestions, ladies?

I'm sorry, Chef Dennis, repeat that briefly.

She wants to know, she's just gonna get started on Pinterest and she wants to know what the best thing she should do to get started on it. She's just starting, okay, how do I proceed? Where do I go to find people to follow or to pin?

Yeah, I would maybe keyword some items on Pinterest and see if you Let's say you want to talk about baking. You know, look up some of your favorite baked items, cakes, whatever, keyword it, you know, hashtag cake, see what you come up with in a search, see if anyone else has— like Sheryl said, I am constantly diverted by that feature of who's pinning what. So if I pin a piece of cake and I see another board pops up, of some of that's also pinned it, I'll often go and I often nowadays have been— I was really following very few and I still do, but that will get me following new people is just by that kind of search and cross-referencing. And, and you gotta— with Pinterest, you gotta kind of go through all the little webs to start finding people to follow. And, and just as a newcomer, create boards with attractive names, things that people are gonna, um you know, see what you like that's already on Pinterest and maybe, you know, do something similar, a little bit different. But I find that the names— I like catchy names for boards. Just get your personality really integrated into it, and I think that that's how success can be found.

Very good, thank you. Okay, we have a question here from Kirsten King, and it's, do you have any tips for starting a new group board and getting people to interact with it? Cheryl, do you do group boards?

Yeah, I do. One of the key things when you— well, I guess there's a couple different ways to do a purpose of a group board, but if you want to get— if you want to start with a specific group of people, it's best to have the person that has the highest amount of followers start that board because automatically you're going to start off with— it's going to go off of their Pinterest following, so you're going to start with the highest, whoever has the highest amount of followers. If you're doing a group board where you just are having anyone join, I mean, I think that's a good— I don't really understand how the group boards work as far as who sees. I know if I start a group board and say Marla joins it, now my group board is showing up on Marla's Pinterest boards and if Marla pins to it, people that follow me see her pin but if I pin to it, I don't think Marla's people see it unless they're specifically following that board. Right, Marla?

Right.

Yeah.

Someone has to be following a board no matter what board it is in order to see the feed. Yeah. Absolutely.

Right.

Right.

So that's why group boards are good to be on. Join a group board that has a big following and if you don't have a very big following, every time you pin to that board, everyone, you know, if say it has 100,000 followers, your stuff is going out to that 100,000 followers as opposed to maybe 4,000 or 6,000 that you have. Group boards are really good for getting a bigger exposure like that. But then you can also do group boards, I'm on one and there's a lot of them now that people do with like a specific group of people, like a network of bloggers, and title it something catchy like the top, you know, 20 food bloggers or something like that and get a group together. And like I said, whoever has the largest following starts the board. And like specifically on the one I'm on, we only pin our content to that board and then we all re-pin each other's content to our other boards. So say I'm on this board and say Marla's on it. Marla only pins her content, I only pin mine. Then I go in there and Marla's stuff that she pinned, I re-pin it from that board to some of my other boards. So that's what we try to do on that one to get, you know, help each other get more exposure that way.

Can you put me on that board?

I'll talk to you later.

That's a good way for people to help create more, more juice, I guess, for each other.

Right, and then we have like a special icon that we have in our sidebars of our blogs to promote that board. Oh, cool. And get people over to it.

That's nice.

Very nice idea. So that way you get to share more and you create a sense of community.

Right, when you do it, you want to kind of set up ground rules. Pinterest doesn't have a way to really communicate So on a board like this, if you set up your specific group and then like we have an email, the person that started this board, she emails everybody. We have kind of ground rules of what you're supposed to do, how you only pin your stuff and how you need to be repinning other stuff that's in there and whatever ground rules you want to set up. And then she emails occasionally when she's got something she wants to pass along. Like we recently updated our little sidebar logo thing and she sent that out to everyone.

Okay, sounds good. Let's go back to some questions here and see what else we have. Alright, Kirsten Hall again, where exactly do I find the data that shows me as a Pinterest user what goes viral and gets repinned the most? Valerie, I think.

So if you're referring to what I was speaking about, I posted those links in the event page. If you scroll down, it's about 4:25, I posted it. There's two links there that describe, that give the infographics that describe what types of recipes get pinned the most. That's an infographic that I did, and then there's an infographic from Curalate that discusses the features of photos that get pinned the most.

Are there any places where it actually shows which pins have gone viral?

No, not that I'm aware of. I mean, it depends on how you define going viral. But in your own analytics, so to access your own Pinterest analytics, there are some instructions online. I don't have a link handy right now. I'll post it in the group in a moment. But you need to have the new look. You need to validate your page and switch over to the new look, although I'm not sure if that's default now yet. Then you'll have access to your own analytics, and that will show you which of your pins are most pinned. If something has gone viral, it'll be somewhat obvious. We have, for instance, at Feastie, we have this one blog post that's been pinned way more than all the others, and whenever I go to my most pinned page, it's filled up with that one image. You can click on it and it'll show you how many times each one of those particular pins has been repinned. So that's, that's one way. There's one more option we do offer that at Feastie if you submit your blog and then claim it through us. We offer some stats as well that are presented in a slightly different way. So that's an option. It is in beta, so it's not perfect, but I'm always working on improving it.

Sounds good. We have a question here from Rebecca, and she wants to know, do you create multiple boards or only focus on a select few? So Cheryl or Marla?

I know Marla has a lot more than I do. Marla's more— well, I guess maybe you're more focused.

I'm very broad, but interest. I have a lot of interest.

Okay, so it's personal.

Yeah, I mean, I have everything Go ahead, Cheryl.

I think it's just a personal preference. I mean, sometimes I look at Marla's and think, gosh, I wish I had that many. I feel like in the beginning I kind of stayed real broad in my boards, and then as they grew and grew and grew, all of a sudden I felt like I couldn't hardly— I didn't want to make new ones that were more focused because I don't know. So now I do have those, but they're more group boards. That I participate in with other people. But I love how you've got all the different boards.

I think it's nice to— sorry, Chef Dennis Littley. No, that's okay. Go ahead. Let's say I have the Sweet Dreams group board. Cheryl, I think you're a part of that as well.

Maybe.

I think. But anyway, people will share desserts. And what's nice is just like you said with those boards that you have with your sort of private communities, what I do is when I see something there that I like as it goes through my Pinterest feed, then I'll share it to some of my other boards, one or maybe one or more of my other boards, or I'll click through, look at the post. What I like to do, actually having a lot of boards, especially because I do use Pinterest to remind me of things, um, let's say it's a chocolate brownie, I might post one of the— not the same photo but one photo from that blog post to my Chocolate Bliss board and then another photo from that post to Brownies and Bars so I know I'm going to be able to find it, you know, in a few different ways should I want to reference it again. So I love having a lot of boards. Also, my interests vary. I mean, I have food boards for everything you could possibly imagine related to food, and then I have contrasting boards that are outdoors, hunting-related, fly fishing. I have a board called Brunettes Have More Fun. I just like to have a lot of fun with it and I do like to get really specific so I can find things again. That's pretty much the deal.

I know I'm always amazed when I go to people's boards and I see there's one for every color, there's one for everything and I'm like, I wish I had that kind of time or that active of an imagination. I guess being a guy I don't see things the same way and it's just like desserts, Sandwiches, soups, okay, alright, let's move on. But I look at them and go, wow, so I do appreciate them. We have another question here, Christina Lane, as bloggers should we make our Pinterest accounts business or personal?

Oh, can I comment on that one?

Absolutely.

Because I was really against making my Pinterest account business for a long time up until maybe a month 6 weeks ago or so because I still feel like my Pinterest boards are very personal, that even though I'm pinning as my blog, I still didn't want to do that. But I realized that really all it is, as far as I understand, is it gives you access to all those analytics. I think that's the only thing, so it's a great advantage to doing to make your Pinterest account, a business account if you want access to those analytics. Is that right, Valerie?

I agree. Yeah, you do need to be a business account to access the analytics. If your blog is you, it's not a group blog, it's not a business blog like ours is actually, and it's a business either way, but I would highlight if the brand of your blog is your personal brand, you can be a business account in Pinterest and still highlight your own personal nature of it by having your face as the avatar and speaking in your own individual voice.

I didn't even know there was a business account.

See? You're probably your own business right now. They've created a— they're going to create a special account for your number of followers.

Oh, okay. I think I'll just Money account.

Super business account. But I think there is no downside to being in the business account. It didn't look like it when I did join, when I did convert it over to that. It only seemed like there were pluses.

I know—

go ahead.

Some people say that they saw a big increase in their following after that. I didn't see that, but I've heard that from a lot of people that they said that their following really took a good jump after they switched to a business account.

So what's the negative?

Uh, there didn't seem to be one.

I don't see anything.

Yeah, one thing you get is when you verify your site, you get a little checkmark or some symbol next to your name, which, you know, it offers some level of social proof to new followers. Someone lands on your board, your account page for the first time, and they see that checkmark, it adds an air of legitimacy, so people might be more likely to follow you.

So if you have that checkmark You're a business account if you have that checkmark?

It means you've verified your site. You've verified that you have that site.

Is that the same thing as a business?

It's the second step. So once you become a business account, you have the option to prove to Pinterest that you own your domain, and then that's when Pinterest will open up the analytics to you. But they also add that checkmark saying this account is actually associated with that website and we have proof.

Okay, good to know.

Then I guess I'm in business.

I guess so. Alright, we have a question here from Maureen Shaw and she says, and Maureen is coming to us from Australia and I don't know if it's still the middle of the night for her but God bless her, she's been with us all times of the night for her asking questions. Are you limited to pinning your own photos? I've been invited, oh she's talking about group boards, I'm sorry, what group boards are concerned. Are you limited to pinning your own photos? I've been invited to quite a few group boards and I'm unsure what the etiquette is.

I think they're all different because a lot of times if they're open to a lot of people, a lot of people will put it up under the description of the board what they set the rules for of how much you can pin. Some of them will say you can only pin so many times a day or so many in an hour or something like that. But I mean, like I said, that one group board I'm in, we only pin our own stuff. Then I have group boards that I have that I ask people to please pin other stuff, not only your own content, so that those boards are full of a lot of different content, not just from those same sites. So I think it depends on what the intent of who started that board is.

Okay, that's good, good to go by. We have a question here from Arlene Mobley and she wants to know, what are your thoughts on rich pins for recipes? Anybody know anything about that?

What are your thoughts on what?

Rich pins.

The rich pins. So basically they show the ingredients.

Oh yeah, no, I don't even understand that. I don't think it's necessary. I think they should go to the blog.

Yeah, I'm very skeptical. That there's a benefit to the markup, but I'm very biased about that. But I think the jury's out. I'd like to see some data on how the rich pins affect the sharing rate and the click-through rate. So what I suspect is that it might slightly increase the sharing rate but decrease the click-through rate. So I don't know. But if you give people— especially if it's something like a cocktail recipe, where there aren't really any instructions, you mix everything together, you're kind of giving everything away.

I feel like they just detract, being that Pinterest is entirely visual for me, I don't want to see, you know, a feed that's really long with text. It's actually, it distracts me, and I delete that content too. I don't even know where it comes from, I don't even know how to make a text have this, whatever you call it, rich something.

But, uh, if you want the recipe markup in your blog, it pulls it.

Oh yeah, no, I hope it doesn't for mine. I don't, I don't see it when I pin, but I think it's very distracting and I'd rather go to the blog as a source. And I, if I saw it and if I could delete— whenever people leave really, really long descriptions all about the recipe, I delete it. I just put the recipe content. It's actually, to me, just or tons of hashtags on a pin, I delete them all. I just think it's overwhelming. I'm there for visual, not for text.

Okay, sounds good. I agree with you on that. I think Pinterest was a visual market and it should really much stay that way, but I guess they're trying to change it with the times. Nicole Burkholder asked a question, I must have missed it. It's never been clear to me if you follow a board only and don't follow all —does that increase the followers numbers?

Anyone know that? Yes, I believe it does. Because I know— yeah, because I'll see my complete counts increase all the time on Pinterest, but certain boards have 30,000 followers, certain have 100,000 followers, certain have 28,000, but my numbers are constantly increasing. So I believe if they follow any boards, it's considered a new follower. Wouldn't you say, Sheryl?

Yeah, I think so. I think so too.

Yeah, I think in the beginning it wasn't that way, but I think it ended up— they ended up changing it.

I think it ended up that way. Yeah.

Okay, let's see, we got another question here. Oh, Kim Pebly wanted to know, do you have to be an LLC to start a business account, or just have a valid domain for your blog? Valerie, she's asking you that.

Yeah, you know, You have to have an LLC.

They don't check that at all. Okay, here we have a question from Maria, and she's saying, what are your thoughts about— your thoughts about Rich Pins? We did talk about that. Has your traffic decreased? Does any— okay, is anyone— are any of you using it? I know Marla, you said you're not. Cheryl, you're not. No one's using it. So I guess the jury's still out on that Rich Pins thing, like you said. Okay, that's all the questions we have so far. Looks like about it. If you guys have any more questions, please ask them, put them in the comment tracker. We have some time left to go. We did have a question, I know it's off topic a little bit, but it has to do with, I guess, your own pins yourself and how they are valued and why they might do better than others. It was about your photography. If there were any photography tips you could take to make Pinterest images that will appear better on Pinterest, that do well on Pinterest.

Oh, you have to have a vertical image. Any horizontal image just gets clipped and it shows up so small, you lose— it could be the most beautiful food image and I'm probably not going to repin it or pin it at all because it's just no one's gonna people just don't notice them. They don't get the real estate on Pinterest when it's a horizontal image. It's a shame because there's beautiful images that are, but I'd say portrait, portrait is the way to go. I actually had written a post, I think it was last year, maybe early this year, I don't know, called The Perfect Pin, which you can find on my blog if you just kind of keyword that. And I go into it and I talk about the vertical imagery, I talk about Sometimes it's really nice to have a title overlay. Sheryl does that often too, to put a title overlay on one of the images in your post, not all of them, maybe the one that's in the metadata that's going to get pinned the most. But I also think that a lot of images should have no overlays. I think kind of a mix is nice. But you got to have a sharp, beautiful photo, I feel, to really have it stand out on Pinterest and to have people want to go to your blog and repin the image too.

Do you use mostly available light or do you use any— I'm all natural light, always.

Natural light. Yeah, available natural light. I'll move around throughout the day but mostly, thankfully up here at 10,000 feet I'm really close to the sun so I have light 8 in the morning to 9, 8 at night. It's good for photography. It was a lucky thing, it was a lucky move.

Good. Cheryl, how about you?

Oh yeah, all natural. All natural.

Is there anything you can give any tips or hints on your photography on how to make them more readily available or more successfully pinned?

No, I think like what Marla said, trying to have at least one image that has text on it. 'cause sometimes you can't always tell by looking at an image maybe exactly what, or it makes it sound more enticing to say you have a, I'm doing Monday, instead of just putting cheesecake, it's a salted caramel cheesecake with a chocolate ganache. I mean, it just makes it sound a little more enticing if you have a little bit of text on there, but I don't know, I'm kind of getting to where I kind of like to have it just kind of smaller and more subtle somewhere. On the photo instead of a great big banner or something really big where the words take over.

Yeah, it's got to be about the image, I think. Okay, here's a question.

I think it's cheesy.

It's overbearing when it's too big. They get that way. I agree with you. It starts, you know, a little bit looks professional like a magazine, but then when it starts to become the main part of the picture, then I think you're losing the whole idea.

Yeah. It's the same thing with that text and the pictures, you know, chocolate brownie, whatever, whatever. But don't tell me, ooey gooey chocolate brownie, the best you've ever had. Did it? I'm like, whoa, you just lost me.

You're not leaving much room for the picture then at that point. Yeah, no. All right. Brenda Bennett asked a question, and it's something I think we've all had happen, is what do you do when someone has copied and pasted your your entire recipe on the picture. Ask them to remove it, and if they don't do anything, what else can you do?

I usually report it. I just put a little— yeah, and I'll just put— I forget what it's called, but where you can just report it somehow. And all I'll write is, they've put my entire recipe in the comments. And really, I don't go back and check on them. Assuming they take them out, I don't know. It's slowed down tremendously since they limited how much you can put in there. So it's— I don't spend much time trying to track those down much anymore.

Sometimes they split it into different comments. Oh, they do? I've seen that if the instructions are too long. I've been able to delete a comment before, maybe because it was on my own pin, but if it's your own pin, it seems you can delete the comments. I'm not sure if you verified the site if it lets you just delete, it would be nice if you could just delete the comments if you own the site.

Okay, alright, Creole Contessa wants to know, do you think it's okay to limit your Pinterest group boards to bloggers only? "I had to delete 1,500 people due to spam. I only limit it to bloggers now." That's kind of interesting.

Your board, I don't limit.

The group boards.

The group boards. The group boards, I just, I don't really watch my group boards carefully. If there is spam content going on, I've had other pinners who do tend to watch my boards carefully alert me to that, and then sometimes I've had to go through Why I had a few days worth of content to delete the spam. And then immediately, of course, you take them off that board once you find someone's going against the rules. I had that Sweet Dreams Dessert board. Someone was consistently posting savories, long ugly photos, step-by-steps of savory. I said, I took her off. She kept emailing me after that, why'd you take me off? How does chicken fit into sweet dreams? So you got to watch those group boards. I find that people really enjoy them. I don't subscribe to— only if it's a good client group board. But I mean, what do we get? 10 invitations a day at least. I never accept them. Yep. This is incredibly rare if I do.

Or very small. Too much clutter. Yeah. Okay, we have a question here from Stephanie Red Cross and she wants to know, is anyone posting multimedia to Pinterest like videos and slides? Anybody doing that? I'm not.

I've posted, not of my own, but I mean I've pinned video, I have a music board, it doesn't have a lot on it, but I've been on YouTube and stuff and pinned songs or videos that I like. I think I did pin one of my own. I have a video of how to cut up a chicken and I pinned that video, I think.

So sometimes I do. Would infographics fall into that, Valerie? Is that like a slide?

I mean, to me an infographic is usually just a long photo. But yeah, I have a board specifically for infographics. Yes, and actually it turns out that when your infograph— when your photo is too long, you start to lose the benefit of having a longer photo because now people have to scroll to the top to hit repin. But they are somewhat popular, and it's one thing that people are using Pinterest for that's not in specifically the food space and fashion and decorating types of spaces.

Okay, we had a couple questions here I think we followed. Ronnie Keller wanted to know about adding a banner or words and title, does it pin better? And I think you both said that it's just a matter of it isn't overdone that it pins well. And Julie Deli—

I think variety. Variety? Is key.

Okay, is that of what you pin, you mean like the types of foods or variety style in the banners or how you put them on your pictures?

Oh, you know, I think the best sites out there are the ones that shock me every time I go to them with their photography and the way they've captured even just a small graphic on it. I mean, again, like Cheryl said, it's just something small and subtle. It's really the way now. It's just not the way to be really gregarious about how you pin it, because really you're looking at art, food art, food photography, or whatever. I pin a lot to my lifestyle boards. Portraits, lifestyles, and there's no words on those. They're just strictly beautiful images. I don't know how much they get repinned, but they should because they're just breathtaking.

Can I say something though? Sometimes you find a post that isn't about the pictures, has great content of maybe blogging, some kind of information, but they don't have anything for— and I want to pin it. So I can share it with other people or remember about it later and they don't have a photo or they have photos on it that are totally unreal. I was reading one the other day about how to streamline your, you know, take control of your email and she had tons of pictures on the post but they were all pictures of herself just kind of scattered throughout the post. So I didn't really want to pin one of those because it didn't really have anything to do with what the post— so I found a site where I could make like a Post-it thing and I wrote out, you know, some kind of information. So anyway, if you have an informative post that really isn't, you know, doesn't have a photo, if you can make some kind of graphic or something, something so people can pin those posts, you know, I think that's a good idea. Because I run into those every now and then.

You want people to pin something.

I do too, and I'm stumped. I can't pin it. If it's not An image that appropriate— if there's no image that appropriately represents the content, well then why do it? But like Sheryl said, sometimes it's not a photo. Sometimes it's all words. I have a words of wisdom board. And sometimes it's just sweet, text-driven— you guys see them all the time, the quotes, the things. But even Sheryl, like you said, if it's how to clean your fridge or whatever, how to wax your floors— you did something that you posted Repin something like that earlier. Yeah, even if you just gave me text that said, how to perfectly wax your floors, I'm okay with that. Just make sure that there's stuff that's going to follow it up in that blog post. Has to. It can't be pictures of someone on a cell phone.

No, I know what you mean about those boards. Some of them are really nice and really inspirational, and then I saw one the other day I never got to read, it was how to clean your dishwasher with Tang. And that really interested me. I didn't get to go read it so I'm going to have to Google that one later. Julie Daly asked a question and it's something we covered. It was about a business account and what else would she get if she converted her account. You get access to the analytics, Julie. I think that's about it. We haven't figured out a whole lot more. You're going to get verified.

She claims she's getting the analytics so I guess they changed the rules. Get it without having a business account. In that case, I'm not sure what you get.

You should be good to go. We don't know. Hopefully we can find out. Good answer. Alright, Nicole Burkholder, I recently had a pin removed from a board by Pinterest because it had been reported. They emailed to tell me why it disappeared. It wasn't my pin, someone else was in breach of contract. I thought it was cool that Pinterest was on top of it and then they let everyone know who had pinned the image, why it was gone. Okay, she's just making a statement. That is good of them.

So let's hope they keep it. But it does happen. Oh yeah, I get those periodically. Okay, good.

Alright, okay, Maria again. What are your thoughts about hashtags? And I was going to ask that. Thank you, Maria. Hashtags on Pinterest, do they help? And if they do, how many is good?

I've always heard— I've heard that Pinterest doesn't use the hashtags, just So I don't use them. I usually— I don't use them. I pin something that has them because I feel like it just clutters up the comment section.

It's overkill sometimes, and you see people using like 12 of them for everything. It's the same on Google+.

Too many. I'll use them like maybe 1 or 2, maybe just to catch the eyes of someone that needs a specific dietary situation, like a gluten-free or paleo type thing. But they're not, I tend to not use them, I don't think they're effective at all on Pinterest as far as searching. As a matter of fact, if you do keyword an item, let's say cookies or whatever, you're really going to get pretty spammy stuff come up on Pinterest. You're not going to, like if you go to Foodgocker or one of those and you keyword an item, you're going to come up with exactly what you need. But on Pinterest, I find you're not going to come up with anything usually remotely— well, you know, it'll be like a girl that calls herself Cookie. You know, it's just kind of— but the hashtags, I don't think they're effective at all. And they're not worth— and again, it's visual clutter. We only want to see your pictures, not your hashtags. I'll remove them too, Sheryl, if I see them.

Pinterest search is pretty feeble right now. But I would count on them to improve that over the next year or two. I hope they're improving it because it's not good. Exactly. And when they do, the hashtags could play a new role. So I mean, just always bear in mind that these things are moving targets, and Pinterest is still relatively young. They're still living off of $100 million or something of venture capital, and they have a big team working on lots of things. So it's always changing, and the hashtags might be useless today, but 6 months from now, you know, it might be a great way to get new followers. So it probably doesn't— aside from a little bit of clutter, it probably doesn't hurt too much to put, you know, 2 or 3 if you think of it, but no more than that.

Okay, here's a question while we're on that. A lot of times I see pins, and when I pin them, there's no information about the person, the blogger themselves, the photos from. Is it a good idea to have your name in there with the, with the text, like underneath the pin, you know, in it, like saying if it's a chicken Caesar salad via your blog name? Because I don't see that all the time on people. Wait, to do what?

To put your blog name?

Yeah, like when you pin what it is, when you give it a title, should you have your blog name in there?

Oh, I always put my— I figure, yeah, I always attach to my metadata is say roastchicken/familyfreshcooking.com because that becomes an active link. And even if someone takes off that content, at least I've tried to protect the integrity of my image before it ends up in the Google wasteland should that happen. I always feel like, why not? It's your— you created that content. But I don't start— I used to put like copyright Marla Meredith, all that. And I said no more. That's just too— I'm just inundating people if I put too many words. But I always do put familyfreshcooking.com.

Okay, great. Okay, well, that answers the question for me. Let's see. It's Kool-Aid. Nicole Burkholder said it's Kool-Aid, not Tang, and it worked well. Okay. Ah, all right. Thank you. I'll have to— I'll have to Google that because I haven't cleaned my dishwasher in a long time, so it might be good. Hilarious.

Ronnie, I have a post on it.

Do you have a post on it? I do. Oh, good. On YouTube. Maybe it was mine you saw. I don't know, it could have been. Thank you, I will go check that out because I do clean my entire kitchen. My wife stays out of the kitchen pretty much, which is a good thing. She has a lot of other good points and she makes more money than I do, but I clean the kitchen well, so it's good to know. Ronnie Keller asks, do you include a link back to your blog site when pinning the original pin? In theory, when it's repinned by default your URL is also shared. I've heard both bad and good about that. So the URL is always shared when it's repinned, isn't it? Or it's always attached to the pin when it comes from your site. So we did answer that. Okay, Kim Pebbley, if you share your pins to other social media like Twitter, hashtags become important. Okay. Can you share from Pinterest to Twitter? I didn't even know that.

I don't know why you wouldn't just share directly to Twitter if you're going to— like, why not just tweet the blog post? Because then you're making people hop through two things to get back to your site. What's the point of that?

Absolutely. And I tweet— I pin like 100 items at a time. There's no way I would ever link to Facebook or Twitter. And fill that stream with Marla just pinned blah blah blah.

Oh, it would be awful. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, when they first joined I did that and I took it off right away because my Facebook stream was getting ridiculous from all the pins.

Yeah, I don't do it automatically but I click that little Twitter box when I pin sometimes. Not for mine specifically but more for other content I'm pinning so then that way people that follow me on Twitter come and see what I'm pinning and I get lots of people that comment that they enjoy seeing my pins through Twitter. But I don't do it with all of them.

Yeah, you get to pick and choose then, so you're deciding which content is really going to draw the people to it and that's the way it should be. Good. That's smart, yeah. Alright, Terry Henkels has asked, do you think having a business account could be more than just the analytics but also be a way for people to get to know you as a business in a more personal way. Hmm. I don't think I understand that. I think she's saying that people will think you're a business then, or realize that your blog is a business rather than just a person pinning things.

I'm not sure that regular users even see the difference. I'm not sure it's made clear that this is a business versus personal. And if it is, people probably don't notice.

Yeah, I think they're just looking at your content pretty much. Yeah. If you pin good stuff, they're going to follow you. Being that I never—

I still don't know the difference, and I'm going to Google it when I get off. I don't know if I'm a business or not. It has not affected in one way what's going on. And again, I don't know what mine is. I know it's verified, but I don't know. I don't think people care. Okay, very good.

Alright, well— Oh, I see someone just asked if we—

yeah. Go ahead. Someone asked if we schedule pins. No way. I think scheduling anything, tweets and pins and all that, can get in the way of real life stuff, especially something like Twitter, maybe not as much Pinterest. But I feel like I need to be the voice behind all pins at all times, not scheduling and you just never know when something's going on out there and you're the only fool on Pinterest when there's been like a huge, you know, real-life crisis and you're the only one sitting there pinning because you're scheduled. Right.

I don't think there's any way to schedule them. I do.

Oh, I don't even know. I do, yeah.

I use, well, it used to be called Pingage, now it's Ahology. Okay. And if you use them, you can schedule your own pins, not from other sites. You can schedule your own. So like, I'm going to be on vacation in 2 weeks. I've scheduled some of my own content to pin during that time. You can, you know, so I've done that.

So you're pinning like 50—

Normally like on Twitter and Facebook, I don't schedule stuff because of what you said, but Pinterest doesn't bother me scheduling anything. I don't do it all the time but I do do it some. Because also I'm not on Pinterest in the evenings very much so I do schedule sometimes stuff to pin during the evenings. And Ahology will also let you either pick the time and date or you can let them pick it where they decide what's the best time of day to pin it. Okay, good to know.

That's interesting. Great. Okay, so we've covered a lot of information about Pinterest and I know it does provide quite a lot of hits for us, so it's good to look into it more and try to become more successful at it. So you've given people a lot to think about. If you have any last advice you'd like to share with anyone about pinning or how to be more successful, ladies, anything you'd like to add before we close out here?

I have one real quick thing still on that whole thing with Ahology. For pinning my own content, that's also made it very easy because I'm trying to get some of my content, especially older stuff, on several different boards, but I don't like to pin it all at one time, so then you go look at my pins and I've pinned the same post 10 times in a row. So this way I can look at the schedule and I can pin it now and I'll pin it again a week from now on another board and maybe, you know, 10 days from now on another board. So that's been really nice to do that too. Be able to visually see how I'm spacing them out and getting them around on more boards.

Good thought. That's smart. Yeah. Okay, well, I think that's going to about sum it up for us for our Pinterest, the other social media, and I'd like to thank my guests today. Cheryl Suzanne, thank you so much for taking some time and then coming on this Pinterest part of our conference and helping us with that. Marla Meredith, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to see you, and I'm glad you could make it today. Valerie, thank you again for agreeing. It was very nice meeting you in person at Eat Right Retreat, and I hope we run into each other again sometime. I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and this was session 9 of the first annual G+ Virtual Bloggers Conference. We have one more session coming up to end up this conference. And that'll be session 10 coming up at 6:30, and that is Blog Tech Plugins and, um, or, uh, uh, blog WordPress blog stuff and plugins. I'm sorry, I'm getting a little punch drunk here after all these sessions trying to remember them all. And that is with Keeta Roberts, and she'll be on at 6:30 to answer your questions about blog design, plugins, and tech talk. There we go, I finally got it. So I hope to see you in about an hour, and we're gonna sign off for now. So thank you very much, I'll see you soon.