How to Use Pinterest to Share Your Real Estate Blog Content

Your website is updated and looks great. You’ve committed to one blog post a week, maybe two. You’re on Facebook (of course!) and you’re considering adding another social media account to share your blog and get more eyes on your website.

Have you considered Pinterest?

Pinterest is for more than dreaming about weddings or finding beautiful food creations you’ll never duplicate. If you’ve never given the site much thought, you might be surprised to know that people spend a lot of time thinking about their dream homes, too. Entire boards are devoted to bathroom remodels, bedroom remodels, and perfect backyards. It sounds like somewhere a professional real estate agent should be, doesn’t it?

For people who pair the right image with the right content, Pinterest can be huge for building their business with some people receiving millions of visitors to their website.

A few words of caution.

Pinterest, like every other social sharing site, isn’t all about you or your business. You’ll need to follow other people and share images other than just your own. Don’t be a creepy spammer. Be a friendly pinner, instead.

Using Pinterest for Your Blog

There are two main components for using Pinterest to help attract people to your real estate website:

1. The content of your blog post
2. The image you use

Giving people something worth clicking on to visit your site is important, so you want to share something that’s got a good headline and will appeal to your target audience (buyers or sellers). “How to…” and “# Ways/Things…” posts can work really well on Pinterest.

The image is the most important part, and even here, you have two options:

• Add a high-quality image to your blog post and pin it yourself using that image. Open up the blog post as if you were a viewer to your website, and share it to Pinterest. This is definitely the simplest method and can be effective as long as your image can get people’s attention.
• Create an image specifically for Pinterest and manually add the image (and link back to your blog post) to one of your boards on Pinterest. You’ll need to log in to your Pinterest account for this.

Whichever one you choose, you’ll need a graphic.

Creating a Graphic

Not everyone is a graphic artist (I’m certainly not) and we can’t always hire someone to do the work for us. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools out there to help.

My top recommendation is Canva for a few reasons.

• It’s a simple tool that lets you create images for nearly everything you might need: flyers, business cards, social media images, and more.
• When you select what you’re trying to make (in this case, Pinterest graphic), you don’t have to hunt down the right size. Canva keeps up with that for you.
• Most of the elements and templates are free to use.
• The templates look professional so you will, too.

Another option I’ve used in the past is PicMonkey which comes with plenty of free features, too.

Choosing an Image

You know what you’ll use to make the perfect graphic for Pinterest, but you need a picture. Do not, I repeat, do not find one you like on Google Images or another real estate website and simply save it to your computer. You are potentially violating copyright when you do that (especially if you use an image from another website).

For images, you can purchase them from different stock photo companies as you need them or maintain a monthly subscription. Here are just a few companies to try:

• iStockPhoto
• Shutterstock
• Dreamstime
• Kozzi

To find free images that you’re allowed to use without violating copyright, try Creative Commons Image Search. Images found through this search can often be used for commercial purposes and/or altered (check for restrictions on specific images).

Here’s where something like Canva comes in handy. Once you find the image that you want to use and you know which post you want to share to Pinterest, it’s time to make a graphic for it.

Go into Canva, select the type of graphic you want to make, find the template you want to use, add the image and the blog post title, and you have a professional looking graphic to share on Pinterest. Pro tip: add your website URL in smaller font to the bottom of the graphic. It’s a mark of ownership and another way for people to find you.

When it comes to sharing content on Pinterest that links back to your blog, you really want to choose one with a headline that grabs attention: 25 Ways to Sell Your Home in 30 Days or 19 Things You Should Do Before You Buy a Homes. Make sure the blog post can live up to the splashy headline or you’ll be ignored or labelled a spammer.

If you’re active on Pinterest already, this may be fairly easy for you to do. For those who are new to the site, take your time and look around first. Create an account, build some boards, and start pinning for a few days. Once you’re comfortable, now it’s time to find your best blog posts to share or start writing them, create an image, and connect with a whole new audience on Pinterest.