How to Use Pinterest to Promote Your Next Event by @dancarthy2

You’re falling short on your marketing potential if you’re not using Pinterest for promoting your next event. What’s so special about this social network? For starters, it has 72.5 million users as of early 2015. 71% of those users are women. With that in mind, this is a great resource to take advantage of if you’re trying to court the female demographic.

Here’s a few tips to make the most of this image-centric social network.

1. Create Pinterest Boards

Pinterest boards are a way for users to organize their photos into categories. You can create a board specifically for your event and include all the relevant photos, including pics of the venue, company products that will be for sale, and so on.

Give the board a name that is easily recognizable so that followers will know what to expect when they browse the board and (hopefully) pin their favorite photos. Like with most other social media outlets, you should also include the event’s hashtag for your boards.

Here’s a great example of a Pinterest board for an event. This board belongs to hospitality and event planner Sara Berger.

Photo credit: Sara Berger’s Pinterest

As you can see, the board includes a diverse selection of images. This includes photos of the printed flyers posted on a pole and folded into an airplane. It also includes a number of infographics.

2. Utilize Secret Boards

Secret boards are exactly what the name suggests. They’re only visible to you and whoever you choose to give viewing privileges to. Secret boards are a great way to start most boards. Once the board begins to rack up the pins, then that’s when you make it public. After all, a board with pins in the single digits probably won’t reflect well on your brand.

Your event board can initially be made a secret with access only to staff members and loyal consumers. You can make the board public once the pins have accrued to a decent number.

You can also set up multiple secret boards for your event with different collections of photos for each. Publicly publish only the ones that reach a certain number of pins. This is a good way of gauging the boards that will perform well with a general audience.

3. Connect with Other Pinners

As an active Pinterest user, you should also pin your favorite photos belonging to users in your event industry. Why should you do this? For one thing, building up someone else’s board is a nice thing to do. Second, by being a regular pinner and commenter on other boards, you’ll see who else are doing the same.

These people are your targeted demographic that you want to reach out to. Once you identified specific users, use Pinterest’s private message feature to reach out to these people on a more personal level. Not everyone will respond, but the ones that do may be more inclined to hear about your event.

4, Post “Epic Fail” Pics

Normally, you want to post the most flattering pics that you think will generate a lot of pins. However, you can get just as many pins by going the opposite route. You don’t always have to take your campaign so seriously. Show your followers that you have a lighthearted side by posting pics from portions of the previous event that, in hindsight, are mistakes to be avoided.

Photo credit: Busy Event’s Pinterest

Here is an excellent example of this from Pinterest user Busy Event. The board included a number of things that you generally wouldn’t want your followers to be privy of. Photos included event staff members dozing off, misspelled signs and banners, and a presentation being given before a near-empty room.

5. Be Selective with Your Images

Don’t just upload any pics that are event-related. Be choosy about what goes on your board. Studies have actually been done on the types of images that get the most pins. It helps to keep a close eye on these studies.

According to one study, for example, color plays a very important role. In fact, images with multiple dominant colors receive over three times the pins as images with only a single dominant color. The image below illustrates this perfectly.

Photo credit: Search EngineWatch

The same research also suggested that images with red tends to get a good number of pins. Also, images that contain less than 30% white space gets repined the most. Finally, images that do NOT contain a human face is 23% more likely to be repined.

To make the most of social media promotion, you have to make use of the social networks beyond the obvious sites like Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest has a lot of potential for event planners, and implementing the steps above should help you build your attendance rate to new levels.