Our social media team, data scientists, and marketing gurus have gathered to bring you eight steps you can take to build your TpT brand and expand your reach with Pinterest.
Start a Pinterest account for your TpT store. If you have a personal account and are pinning your resources there, it may confuse educators interested in your resources and ideas because it lacks brand recognition and subject matter expertise.
- Make sure your TpT store logo is set as your profile photo
- Your account name should be the same as your TpT store
- The URL under your name should direct people to your TpT store or blog
- In your mini-bio, include a brief message explaining who you are, a few interests, and what grade or subject you teach.
Create subject matter boards — start with at least five boards on specific topics.
- For example, if you’re a math teacher, two boards you might create include a “Math: Adding & Subtracting” board and a “Math: Place Value” board.
- This will not only help keep you organized, it will help with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
- If a teacher is searching Pinterest for “Math resources on place value” your board is likely to come up in the search results. It wouldn’t come up in the results if you had simply named your board “Math” because that’s too broad.
- Keep boards that have similar subject matters grouped together.
- You are able to rearrange your boards- put boards that are specific to a time period or holiday that is approaching at the top.
- For example: If you have a Halloween themed board, you may want to move it to the top of your profile in August or September.
- Do not start public boards without pinning to them soon after. You can either create a board and fill them up with at least 10 pins right away, or keep the board “secret” until you’ve filled with enough pins to look full. You can’t make a board secret after it’s already been shared as public, so if you want your board to be private until you fill it with pins, make sure you choose that option when you initially create the board (slide the “secret” option over to yes in the board creation window).
Follow others accounts relevant to you (other TpT’ers, teachers who teach the same grade level as you, or people who you follow on other social media platforms).
- Repin, Repin, Repin!
- If you only pin the resources and activities you’ve made, you won’t get much engagement because it will essentially be an extension of your TpT Store.
- Share other TpT’ers resources, blog posts, activities, creative ideas, and other content often.
- As a community, supporting each other by sharing quality content made by TpT’ers is a win-win.
- In our experience, the traffic to a TpT’ers blog can be boosted (~30%) by regular re-pinning.
- Pair up with friends and pick a week where you share a few of each others favorite posts and resources that are relevant and timely with your own followers.
When pinning your own resources, think about using more than just resource covers as the pin image.
- Based on our data, real photographs get more engagement than resource covers.
- Use a camera or your smart phone to take photos of your resources being used by your students. See TpT Resources in Action examples here.
- Upload them to your computer, and pin them so that they link back to the resource in your TpT store (see Upload your own pin below).
- Pinning can be done one of three ways:
- Repin: Pinning someone else’s pin to one of your Pinterest boards
- Pin from site: You can pin an image or resource by directly pinning from a blog or a TpT page using the “Pin it” button.
- Upload your own pin: You can upload your own pin that links back to any webpage you’d like. This is the type of pin that you’d need to do in order to pin a “resource-in-action” image.
Pinterest favors long images. They’re given more space and stand out to Pinterest users browsing their feed or search results.
- Learn how to create a long pin using PowerPoint here (thanks to TpT Teacher-Author CampingTeacher)
- Get creative and create a long collage using free software like BeFunky or Canva
- How to create a long pin using BeFunky:
- Go to: www.befunky.com/create/collage
- Click “Templates” on the left navigation
- Choose “Pinterest,” located at the bottom
- Pick a long image template. You can delete any squares you don’t need by hovering over them and clicking the trash can icon
- Insert your cover images, preview images, or photos of resources in action
- How to create a long pin using Canva:
- Go to: www.canva.com
- Choose “Pinterest Graphic”
- Click “Uploads” to upload your cover images, preview images, or photos of resources in action
- You can add backgrounds, text, and clip art if you’d like to add to your graphic (but don’t make it too busy)
- How to create a long pin using BeFunky:
- Once you’ve created your long pin, follow step #4 “Pin Resources-in-Action Photos” above to ensure that the pin you created is linked to your TpT store!
- Once you have a few quality educational boards up and running, it’s time to create lifestyle boards.
- These include boards such as “Quotes I Love,” “Teacher Style,” or “Summer Vacation Ideas.”
- These will give your followers a glimpse into who you are as a person.
- They should be related to teaching if at all possible (ex: Your quotes board may have quotations about the importance of teachers), but it’s okay to mix it up a little and post more personal pins.
- Posting onto your lifestyle boards will help you gain new followers.
- Topics like style, travel, quotes, crafts, DIY, home decor are heavily searched on Pinterest. A pinner can find your account when looking up a fashion idea, but choose to follow you because they like your teaching resources.
- The description is what Pinterest’s search engine looks at and pulls from, so make sure your pin descriptions are clear and descriptive.
- Think about what a teacher would search for to find your resource, and include that in the caption.
- Make sure you list the subject matter, grade level, and basic information relating to your resource or blog post.
- 200-300 characters/50-60 words — make it snappy!
- Use call to actions like “Click to see more!” or “Get this from my TpT store!”
Your board covers should not be random. Make sure you go through each of your boards and set a board cover by clicking “Edit board,” then “change” next to “Cover.”
- You can decide to either create custom branded board templates or an existing pin from that board (examples of both below).
- When choosing an existing pin, be sure to select a clean, visually appealing image with not much text. This is a good place to use a resource-in-action photo.
We hope you find these tips helpful! We want to challenge you to pin a few resource-in-action photos that are linked back to your store. Start with a few every week and use the infographic provided in step #4 for guidance. We hope you’ll report back in the social media challenge forum thread. Let us know if you see increased sales or traffic to your store or increased engagement on your Pinterest account after a few weeks of consistently applying these tips and tricks!
Happy pinning!
