Beginners Guide to Using Pinterest for Healthy Living
/
Some of you may already be familiar with Pinterest, but I am sure many are thinking something along the lines of:
“I don’t have time to get involved in another social media platform”
OR
“Isn’t Pinterest just full of pretty pictures of fashion, interior design ideas and crafts?”
???????
Well first off, Pinterest isn’t actually a social media platform, it is a visual search engine.
Every image or ‘Pin’ as they are called, that you see on Pinterest, is a link to a web page and usually to a specific blog post. Very often Pins have text overlaying the image which is actually the title of the blog post that you will travel to if you follow the link.
Pinterest is designed so that you can search for a topic and see a list of ‘Pins’ relevant to your chosen topic, or you can use other users’ suggestions for the best articles related to that topic.
This is accomplished with what are known as ‘Boards’ which are essentially collections of Pins on particular topics, made by users. As with Pins, you can search for Boards on any subject.
This means that there are literally thousands of curated collections of really useful healthy living articles available with just a few key taps!
Not only that, but it is incredibly easy to build your own collections of Pins; a bit like ‘bookmarking’ the articles that you enjoyed and want to keep a note of.
Let’s jump in and have a look around…..
Creating your Pinterest account
Go to www.pinterest.com. You will see a ‘Sign up to see more’ popup
Add your email address, a password and your age and click ‘Continue’
You now need to complete a short profile building survey
Select your gender
Pick your language and country and click ‘Next’
If you like you can let Pinterest install a browser button that will make it really easy to create your own Pins from content you see online (You can skip this step if you like).
Select 5 or more subjects that you are interested in (What you select here doesn’t really matter as your behaviour when using the Pinterest will determine the type of content it serves up for you automatically, but this gets you started).
Some healthy living suggestions are:
Men’s fitness
Food drink
Recipes
Healthy eating
Health and fitness
Gluten free
Fitness
Well done! You now have a Pinterest account.
Your Pinterest account dashboard
So your dashboard is where Pinterest will open each time that you log in.
Main Panel
The main panel displays what Pinterest calls your ‘smart feed’. This is essentially a page of Pins that Pinterest believes will be of interest to you, based on your use of the platform, and which Pins are trending at the moment in the topics you are interested in.
As we chose topics like ‘fitness’ and ‘recipes’ during the initial setup, you can see Pins relating to these topics are displayed. If we scroll down the page using the scrollbar at the right-hand side, we see an endless stream of ‘on topic’ Pins!
Menu
The menu allows you to do the following:
‘Home’: Click this at any time to return to your dashboard
‘Following’: This takes you to a page that only displays Pins from Pinterest users that you follow (we will go into this in more detail later)
‘Profile’: This allows you to view or edit your Profile.
’Message Bubble’: Where messages that you receive from other users are viewed
’Notification Bell’: Where all Notifications are found. These can include suggestions from Pinterest, and notifications of actions of people you follow or who follow you.
‘3 dots icon’: This option allows you to adjust your account Settings such as your Profile information or Notification choices, or to get Help
If you want, you can go to your Profile settings and add an image and some details about yourself so other users know who you are.
Search bar
The search bar enables you to search using keywords. You can search for individual Pins, Boards, Users and other options (see below for more information).
Pins & Boards
So lets get to the business end of Pinterest. Click this link to visit our Pinterest profile page
The page has an automatically produced header made from our most recent Pins, and displays various information and links related to our account. The most important ones are:
Link to our website – all business pages display this so you can verify it is a real site
‘Follow’ button – every user on Pinterest has these buttons on their profile page and their Pins. Clicking this means you want to follow the output of this user in the ‘Following’ page of your dashboard. Why not go ahead and ‘Follow’ Vitalise Your Life Blog now?
‘Boards’ link – clicking this will display all the boards that we have in our account.
Go ahead……..
Boards
On this page our boards are laid out. You can see the board names beneath each board – these tend to be keyword based and usually give you a great idea of the sort of Pins it contains.
Notice that you can also ‘Follow’ Boards individually rather than the User. This allows you to be very specific about the subject matter that appears in your ‘Following’ feed.
If we click on the ‘Healthy Living Blog’ Board, our main articles Board will open:
Each board has a description of what type of Pins it contains and then the Pins are laid out in reverse chronological order ( newest first) as you scroll down the screen.
Here are links to some of our other boards related to living a healthy lifestyle:
Health Spa @ Home
Healthy Smoothies & Juices
Gluten free & Dairy free Recipes
Womens Health Tips
Pins
On the desktop version of Pinterest, if we hover the cursor over a Pin, it displays a button to ‘Save’ the Pin to our own account (or to one of our Boards if we have any), and the link to the article.
On both the mobile and desktop versions we can click the Pin to get more information about it.
Clicking the Pin enlarges the image and displays the Pin’s description, who created it, the number of times it has been ‘repinned’ (saved on users own boards) and any comments that have been left by users. Again there are buttons for following the creator and for saving the Pin to our own Board.
By clicking the image a second time, we are sent to the article itself
Creating Your Own Boards
To make your own collections of Pins of interesting articles, go to the ‘Boards’ section of your profile and click the ‘Create Board’ PLUS symbol, and give it a name. Alternatively, when you are ‘Saving’ a Pin you can easily create a new Board during that process after clicking the ‘Save’ button on the Pin.
Finding loads of useful Healthy Living content on Pinterest
So a quick summary of what we know so far:
Pinterest is a visual search engine, with articles from all over the web represented by ‘Pins’
We can ‘Follow’ people whose content we like so their Pins show up in our ‘Following’ feed
Pins are stored in collections called Boards – we can make our own and ‘Follow’ other peoples’ Boards so any Pins added to that Board will show up in our ‘Following’ feed
We can create a collection of Pins that we like by Saving them to a Board of our own
Most importantly we can also Search for Pins, Boards or People using the search bar. Just type in some keywords into the bar. Pinterest will initially display a list of Pins related to that topic. Lets try searching for “healthy living”
We have 3 choices here – we can:
Scroll down through the Pins displayed below and Save or click through any we find interesting
Click one of the coloured keyword tabs that have appeared below the search bar and offer suggestions of subheadings related to your search term
Search by Board or People by clicking the down arrow at the right hand end of the search bar (Filter icon on mobile) and selecting one of those two things.
Lets try searching for Boards related to ‘healthy living’
And this is where the power of Pinterest reveals itself. You now have literally hundreds of Boards listed. Each one a curated collection of links to blog articles (and a few products) all on the topic you are interested in!
Here are a few keyword phrases related to healthy living that you might like to try searching and making your own Board for:
Wellness tips
Nutrition advice
Womens health
Healthy recipes
You now have access to recipes for every conceivable diet type or dietary restriction, thousands of yoga routines you can do at home, money saving tips, natural cleaning ideas, nutritional advice, and everything in between……good luck!
PS: DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW US FIRST :)
