Pinterest Group Boards Will Change Your Business for Good

Don’t have a lot of time to spend on Pinterest promoting your brand? You’re not alone. We all have busy lives to attend to!

So how can you maximize your Pinterest growth without spending a ton of time on the platform?

For starters, you need to be using a scheduling tool like Tailwind to automate your pinning! You can watch a tutorial explaining the features and benefits of Tailwind here.

Click Here to Get 1 Free Month of Tailwind

Along with scheduling your pins, you need to be part of group boards!

Group boards are an effective Pinterest strategy that gives you one of the best returns on your time invested compared to all activities you could be doing.

I’ve been using group boards for the past few months and have seen an increase in followers, re-pins, and clicks to my website.

Resource: Learn how to use Pinterest to drive thousands of visitors to your website.

In this article, I’ll be showing you everything you need to know about group boards so you can get started today implementing them as a time saving strategy.

Here is a list of some of the topics we’ll be covering:

• What are Pinterest Group Boards?
• Benefits of using Group Boards
• How to ceate a Group Board
• How to add & remove contributors
• How to leave group boards you’ve joined
• How to effectively use Group Boards
• What not to do with your group board

Are you ready to master Pinterest group boards and begin using them ignite growth in your business?

Let’s dive in.

What Are Pinterest’s Group Boards?

A group board works the exact same as a regular board. The difference is who can contribute to the board. With a regular board, only you can contribute pins to it since you are the board’s creator. With a group board, you’re opening it up so that other people are allowed to pin also.

Makes sense, right?

Group boards will be called many different names like contributor boards, community boards, and collaborative boards. Regardless the term, they are all exactly the same thing.

To distinguish a group board from a regular board, you’ll notice a group icon by the Board Name/Title or if you click on the board you’ll see it has multiple contributor profile favicons like in this photo.

Benefits of Using Group Boards

Now that you know what a group boards are, you probably care most about the benefits and why you should even bother using them in your Pinterest strategy.

#1. Rapid Follower Growth

Check out how it works. Let’s say someone clicks “follow all” on a contributors profile. This causes them to follow every board on that contributors profile, including the group boards that contributor is part of. This means they are now following the group board you are a member of and will see pins you publish to the group board.

This increased exposure to other contributors followers is a surefire way to rapidly grow your Pinterest following.

#2. Exponentially increase your number of repins

You’re already winning by being a Pinterest user. Here is a statistic to pump you up a little! Pinterest pins are 100 times more spreadable than a tweet.

Add group boards to the mix, and now your pins have the potential to go viral quite often. Yep, they are that powerful.

Lots of repins means more traffic to your site and potentially more subscribers, customers and clients. This is what you want, right?

But you have to be strategic about which group boards you’re joining. For starters, you need to join boards relevant to your niche and that contain followers who fit your target audience.

You also need to seek group boards to join that have large followings. The greater number of followers a group board has, the greater the opportunity to get your content repinned by lots of people.

The more your content gets repinned, the better it will perform in Pinterests Smart Feed, which leads to even more repins and views by people using Pinterest search.

Before you know it, your pin has spread like wild fire reaching thousands of people.

Pretty exciting isn’t it?

Keep an eye on your pins by monitoring your Pinterest Analytics frequently. Read this to learn more about using Pinterest Analytics in your business marketing and traffic growth strategy.

#3. Automation of pinning (aka pins on autopilot)

A lot of biz owners will hire social media managers to take care of posting for them so they can focus their time elsewhere. But with Pinterest you have a few options first before you should consider shelling out the money for a social media manager.

First and foremost you need to be using a scheduler tool as we’ve discussed.

Resource: Try Tailwind for 1 Month FREE

Secondly, group board members become your brand ambassadors and help put your pinning on autopilot. How so?

Members of a group board will be searching through the board’s feed looking for pins to save to their profile for later viewing.

If your content provides them value in some form, they’ll repin it which means you’ve got a whole network of people pinning your pins for you, spreading it around Pinterest World for others to see. This puts your pins on autopilot, freeing up your time to focus on other areas of your business.

#4. Increase engagement and create brand ambassadors

If you start your own group board (which is recommended once you have an established brand), you can easily invite your customers to pin to the group board. This will get them more engaged and involved in your social media community. It will also elevate them to the role of brand ambassadors, who their followers are more likely to take note of. The best way to get new customers is through referrals of existing customers.

How To Create A Contributor Board

Go to your profile page and under the boards tab, find the “create a board” box which is next to the first board on your page.

Then select the option to Create a Board and give it a name. Hit publish. Once your board is created, click the edit pencil to open up this screen

Fill out the description sharing what purpose the board serves, any rules for contributors to follow, and include keywords to help the board rank in Pinterest search.

Give it a category relevant to content the board will feature. In the case above, I gave the board the category “sports.”

The only step left to make it officially a group board is by adding contributors!

How To Add Contributors to Your Group Board on Pinterest

Take a look at the photo above again and you’ll notice the section titled Contributors. You then simply enter the username of someone or their email address to send them an invite to join your board.

If you enter the username, you must be following them first. As you start entering their username it should automatically populate in the menu dropdown making it easy for you to select their account.

Select the all names you want to add as contributors, enter all the email addresses, and click invite. Then save your settings using the Save button.

What happens next?

Pinterest will send an invitation from you, the board creator, to the invitees to join your board. When they accept, they can pin on the same board with you and the group board will appear on every contributor’s page. Often, this board will be located down near the bottom of your profile.

You can of course make any of your current boards into a group board. Just follow the steps above.

Remove Notifications of Group Boards

To avoid receiving a notification from Pinterest every time a contributor adds a new pin to the group board, you can turn off the notifications in your settings. Boom! You just saved yourself a hell of a lot of email spam and clutter. (:

Pinterest will send you a notification each time a contributor pins to a group board. I recommend you turn off these notifications to avoid bombarding your inbox with unnecessary emails.

How To Remove Contributors From A Group Board

If someone starts getting out of hand, posting content detrimental to your group board, then you may wish to remove them! Or perhaps someone asked you to remove them because they couldn’t figure out how to leave the group board themselves.

No worries, it’s a simple process.

When you’re ready to remove a contributor, visit the group board page and click on the edit pencil. Up will pop the editor screen and you’ll see under the Contributors section a list of the contributors. Find the persons name who you want to remove and click the button Remove button next to their name.

You can also delete the board entirely if you created it by hitting the Delete Board on the far right.

How To Leave A Group Board

In the example below, my golf account was added to someone else’s fashionable hats group board that I can leave anytime. To leave, all you have to do is visit the group board page, click the edit pencil, and this screen will pop up.

Click on the Leave button and then Pinterest will prompt you by asking if you are sure you want to leave the group board, so just click Leave again.

Congrats, you just permanently removed yourself from that board.

How to Effectively Use Group Boards?

Group boards serve a few major purposes that will be beneficial to you. For starters it’s great networking. You get to pin alongside other influencers building a connection to them. This can lead to future collaborations outside of Pinterest like guest blog posts, partnering together for a webinar, or other purposes.

You also get to show your authority on a subject. The content you post to group boards can position you as an expert and lead people to your website where they can subscribe to your email list in hopes of getting more great content from you.

When you join a group board, make sure to introduce yourself to other contributors. Send them a direct message and inform them of how you’re both contributors to the same board. Ask them about their business and show interest in them. Give value first before you ask for something in return.

What Not to Do

While we’ve covered a lot of important tips and benefits of using group boards there are a few things to caution you about.

When you go to send invitations to contributors, it’s recommended that you only send to those people who have expressed interest in your brand. Sending out mass invitations will only annoy users, plus you don’t want everyone and anyone posting to your board.

Instead, you should invite users who are in your niche and will post relevant content your target audience will love.

One way of encouraging the RIGHT people to join your group boards is to add a line in the board description. You could state that you welcome contributors who want to post about topics XYZ and to join they should add a comment to a pin within the board or message you.

If you’re feeling up to it, you can even leave an email address in the board description for them to contact you and request access to contribute.

And with that, you’ve completed today’s epic guide on Pinterest’s group boards!

Comment below if this is a Pinterest strategy you will be using in your business. I’d love to hear if you’ve been doing so already and how it has been working out for you.