I struggled a lot when I first started managing the Pinterest account for Digital Photography School.

I knew that I wanted to focus on visual curation, and that I wanted to provide a comprehensive overview of techniques and tools. There were so many possible boards I could create and I didn’t know what was the best tactic or idea. Should I spin this topic off into a separate board? Should I avoid creating this board altogether?

Then I accidentally stumbled across the concept of a Pinterest persona. My partner and myself are amateur photographers and I found myself asking whether I would be interested in the content that I was pinning. If it didn’t seem relevant then I wouldn’t pin it. This saved me so much time when making decisions and has allowed the DPS brand to maintain a very consistent focus.

It’s what today’s Challenge is all about.

Image by SebastianDooris, licensed under Creative Commons

What is a Pinterest persona?

A Pinterest persona is simply a description of the type of person you are targeting with your Pinterest account. This is very similar to the concept of a blog persona. The difference is that Pinterest users have a different level of savvy and you want different behaviour from different groups.

Darren has previously written about creating reader profiles/personas to help with your blogging and identified the many benefits:

• It personalizes the blogging experience.
• It informs my writing.
• It identifies opportunities.
• It can be helpful for recruiting advertisers.
• It identifies ways to connect with your readership.
• It will identify opportunities to monetize your blog.

I recommend that you check out that article and see the type of profiles he created for Digital Photography School readers. I adapted these for my Pinterest Personas, and you can adapt them for yours, too.

Your persona description should include information about:

• how people discover your boards
• why they repin certain types of pins
• why they use Pinterest in general
• what inspires them to leave comments
• why they like a pin.

I recommend you wait at least a month after starting your Pinterest account before creating personas.

How can you create a persona?

What creating a pinning persona, ask what actions you want people to take when they visit your Pinterest account.

Read this article at the Social@Ogilvy blog. It helps you figure out how your users differ from your blog’s profile. The author recommends that you answer three key questions:

• How does the person behave in social media?
• Who influences the users in social media?
• How will the users engage with the brand or branded content?

You can figure this out by monitoring the types of people that currently interact with your profile. You will notice different behaviours for different types of people. You can then create profiles based around these.

You may notice their needs are different than you thought they were. You may also notice that your Pinterest account isn’t currently meeting their needs. This is fine—it’s all part of the normal Pinterest learning curve.

Your challenge

Your challenge is to create two or three profiles based around the types of people that your Pinterest account is targeting. These won’t be set in stone—instead, they will evolve as you learn more about your followers.

Your next step is to evaluate your Pinterest account and see if you are meeting the needs of these types of people. Be objective. If you’re not serving all of them well, what can you do to better cater to your followers? What changes will you have to make to your Pinterest workflow to accommodate them?

Over to you

Do you have social personas to help you with your account? Are you having any trouble creating them? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see how I can help you.