How Should I Use Pinterest for School Marketing Communications?
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social media platform where users can find ideas and inspiration through photos and videos. Launched in 2010, Pinterest has grown into a powerful tool for users to explore, curate, and share content that resonates with their interests. Users can ‘Pin’ the ideas they love and save them to their profile organised in ‘Boards’. Users can also create pins to share with other users on the platform.
Pinterest's homepage features a personalised feed based on the user's interests, preferences, and past engagement. The platform employs a smart algorithm that suggests content relevant to the user's saved pins and searches, creating a tailored experience for each individual.
The platform supports images, videos and GIFS; all can be hyperlinked to a website. Pinterest is mostly used for lifestyle content, clothing and beauty ideas, and activities. Despite these being some of the most popular uses of Pinterest, it is often used by those in the education sector, seekig inspiration fro classroom activities and classroom decoration.
How Can My School Use Pinterest?
Pinterest can be utilised by many different school departments to share ideas with your audience. As it’s a visual platform we recommend it be used for sharing content on things, not people. The audience of your content will be current families and the internal school community interested to see what the students are creating and working on. Pinterest is a platform for collaboration, users can collaborate on group boards, allowing multiple contributors to curate and share content.
Examples of content a school can share:
| Department | Content Ideas | Board Organisation | Hyperlink |
|---|---|---|---|
| Art | Sharing images of the artwork the students produce Art style/inspiration |
Art page on your school’s website | Hyperlink to Art Page |
| Performing Arts | Share images of set design, costumes, makeup/face paint for a show Productions |
Performing Arts page on your school’s website | Hyperlink to Performing Arts Page |
| Design Tech (Wood Tech, Metal Tech, Food Tech, Textiles) | Share Images of the final projects from the students Style Material Inspiration |
Design Tech page on your school’s website | Hyperlink to Design Tech Page |
| Robotics | Share Images of the final projects from the students Project |
Activities/extracurricular page on your school’s website | Hyperlink to Robotics Page |
The platform can be utilised as part of a bigger campaign. For example, if your school is having an art show, you could post the artwork to Pinterest afterwards, and post a picture of the event (the people, the atmosphere) to Flickr. We recommended posting content a minimum of once a week on Pinterest to keep it up-to-date and fresh.
The way Pinterest is structured via boards, makes it the perfect way to showcase all of the creative work your students have produced in an organised and easily discoverable manner. You may choose to sort your boards, by subject, year/grade group, or with a limit of 200,000 pins and 2,000 boards, your content can even be organised annually. Please see below an example from @CushingAcademy
If you have a Pinterest business account, you can create pins automatically from the content from your website! Connecting an RSS feed to your Pinterest account means that all of your content from that RSS feed will be bulk uploaded to a Pinterest board of your choice. A RSS feed is a web feed format that is used to share up-to-date content. This feature means that if you have previously uploaded photo galleries on your website, they can also be on your Pinterest without extra work.
If you would like further assistance with both inspiring and seeking creative inspiration via Pinterest, please reach out to social@interactiveschool.com