Pinterest for Resorts 3 of 3 Start Pinning
(video transcript)
Welcome to Resort Marketing Vids. I’m Michael Grimm and today we’re continuing our series on marketing with Pinterest for resorts.
If you haven’t watched the two videos from last week, I highly recommend you stop now and go back to do so. In the first video we really explained what Pinterest is, how it works, and what it’s for. Then last week we taught a great strategy to drive traffic to your resorts website.
Today, we’re teaching how to actually set up a Pinterest account, set up boards, share great content, drive leads, and start pinning.
If you want to actively participate in the Pinterest game, the first thing you need to do is set up a Pinterest account. Disclaimer – Pinterest can be highly addictive for some people. It’s not uncommon for a first timer to get sucked into a time vortex, then suddenly emerge, disoriented, hours later.
At the time of this filming Pinterest is still invite only, which means in order to create an account you need to have someone send you an invitation. If you don’t have a personal account, or know anyone who does, fill out the form below this video requesting an ivite and we’ll get one sent out to you right away.
When you create an account, Pinterest asks you to log in using your Facebook or Twitter account. They do this for two reasons. One, to collect your personal information, and two, to make their own site go viral by sharing everything you do with your friends online. For this reason I encourage you to create an account for the resort by signing in with the Twitter account that the resort uses. If you try doing it with your Facebook account you may wind up tying it to your personal account as Facebook automatically associates your resorts account with the administrator of the account.
Once you’ve set up your account you’ll start setting up your boards. These are where all of your pins are going to live. Pinterest will set up a few boards for you by default, these are things such as Places to Visit, or Things to Eat. They are just suggestions from Pinterest, you can keep, change, or delete them as you see fit.
We want to create boards that we can fill with our own photos and boards that our members can contribute to. A few good board ideas to start with are: Vacation Memories, where members can pin their favorite vacation photos, Wedding Inspiration, if you’re one of the many resorts that also offers your location to brides to be, Cross Country Destinations, for your members that are planning, or bragging about, their cross-country RV trip. And of course a bored highlighting your resort. If you have great annual events like Halloween parties or Memorial Day barbeques, you can create boards for those. A place where people can pin their favorite BBQ recipes or for Halloween where they can pin costume ideas.
What you don’t want to do is push your resort in front of people. Nothing will turn them off faster. You want to be discovered by people through delivering great content, or creating an environment that encourages others to share great content.
The next thing we want to do is start browsing. Use the search bar to start finding relevant content that you can share on your boards.  To clarify some jargon, there are three main actions you can take with content on Pinterest. You can Re-Pin, Like, or Comment on photos. Pinterest has photos and videos, and may have more in the future, but for now we’re referencing only photos. When you re-pin a photo it will be added to one of your boards. If you Like a photo it will only be recorded on that photo, there will be no reference made to it on any of your pin boards. When you Comment on a photo, it’s just that, a comment. Leaving a comment on a photo is similarly reflected only on that photo, not on any of your pin boards. So the only way to share a photo with other people, in this context, is by re-pinning it.
So start searching for relevant photos that you think your members will appreciate and re-pin them to your respective boards. Then start encouraging your members to re-pin things to your boards as well. The ultimate goal of course, is to grab the attention of people within your members sphere of influence. But at the same time we’re developing goodwill with our members and the community by providing valuable, relevant content instead of just pushing a sales message down their throats.
That’s all we have time for this week. If you haven’t done so yet, head over to Pinterest dot com, set up an account, and start browsing through it to see what all the fuss is about. And again, if you haven’t watched the previous two videos, go back and give them a look to better understand everything we just talked about.
For the Resort Developers Association, I’m Michael Grimm, I’ll see you later.