Secret or private boards have been eagerly awaited on Pinterest and were made available to all Pinterest users last week. Each user has access to 3 secret boards and if you want to create another new one, you must delete one of the three first or make it a ‘public’ board that can be viewed by others (by turning the secret button to off).
If you are unsure how to crate a shared board, check our our post ‘How to create shared boards on Pinterest’.
Are you wondering how to best use the secret boards for your business? First we need to examine how consumers may use them so you can work how your content might be incorporated into secret boards.
When a person decides to pin an image to absecret board, the board can be found in the dropdown list with all your other categories. Its secrecy status will be indicated by the little padlock.
How Pinterest Users (Your Potential Target Market) May Use The Secret Boards & What It Means For Your Business
1. Planning of parties eg. henparties, stag parties, birthday parties – for any kind of party that they wish to keep a secret or keep the planning a secret.
2. Wedding Plans – a prospective bride and groom could share a secret board, especially before they announce their engagement or if they wish to keep some plans and inspiration private so there’s great scope there for any wedding/honeymoon related businesses. They might even create a secret board for engagement rings before they actually go shopping.’
3. Gift Ideas – shoppers could create a Christmas shopping ‘wish list’ and ‘bought list’ on Pinterest – using it to keep gifts a secret and to keep tabs on what they have purchased. The huge advantage here for online sellers is that pinners are likely to click the pin to purchase the item as they narrow down the items on their wish list.
4. Health - people may use the secret boards to find articles on an embarrassing health problem, something they are worried about or perhaps an early pregnancy that they want to keep secret.
5. New baby or early pregnancy – I can see women using a secret board in the first trimester to bookmark articles about pregnancy, information on new babies and maternity clothes. Hence businesses dealing with pregnancy and early pregnancy issues may do better on pinterest with the new secret boards.
6. New Job – Pinners may plan for a new job from pinning interview clothes, interviewing tips and information about prospective employers.
Remember that secret boards can still be shared between people – it just means that the general public can’t see them. Therefore, they still have the potential to be viewed and repinned by a considerable number of people.
Remember too that if you are invited to contribute to a private hoard, that the entire board can be made public by the originator of the board at any time and that would mean your pins and comments on that board would then be visible.
6 Ideas for Businesses Creating Secret Boards
1. Use it as a secret resource to between team members, for example, members of a marketing department could use it to share ideas in preparation for planning meetings.
2. Use it as a ‘thought board’ for planning a project before make it public.
3. Interior Designers / Kitchen Planners could use secret boards with clients. All parties could add pins to share their thought processes as they work towards creating a moodboard.
4. Photographers could use the secret boards to plan photoshoots with clients and models – in terms of developing ideas for theme, outfits, accessories, make-up, positioning, lighting and more.
5. Journalists, students and bloggers could use private boards as a bookmarking device when researching online while preparing for writing blog posts, newspaper articles and essays. A business could create a secret board for all the team bloggers to share ideas and research content on related topics.
6. Experimenting – bloggers, artists, photographers and many more professions can use a secret board to test how their work appears on a pin before publishing it to a public board.
See ‘12 Ideas for Shared Pinterest Boards‘ too for more general ideas.
Do you have any other ideas for how you / your business can use secret boards on Pinterest?
Photo credit: Mexicanwave via photopin cc
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