My Social Media Strategy: Pinterest and Instagram

You oughta be in pictures, and that includes on social media. My Pinterest account is christanyc. My Instagram account is onefineyogi. These channels are important to me for one main reason: 65% of the population is composed of visual learners so it pays to learn how to communicate with pictures. I am not a naturally visual personal. I am one of the oddballs who is almost entirely an auditory learner so communicating in visuals is very difficult for me. Pinterest and Instagram have greatly enhanced my visual abilities and they are fun to use. This is the big difference between Instagram and Pinterest for me: most of my Pinterest pins are pictures that other people have taken that I find interesting and Instagram is composed of photos I take. 

Pinterest
Think of this as a visual bulletin board that is neatly organized by topics that you choose. I’ve created boards that include Inspirational Words, Healthy Food, and Yoga. Some key points:

• You can either upload images you’ve created or you can upload images from just about any website. When you upload from a website, you can click the uploaded image on your board and it will take you to the site where you found it. I mostly use this latter type of pin to help me bookmark websites that I want to be able to quickly refer to for recipes, visual inspiration, and new product ideas.
• I also frequently pin pictures and quotations that I want to use for future blog posts and for the Compass Yoga and One Fine Yogi Facebook pages.
• I use Pinterest to say hello to friends whom I share interests with (Hi, Sharni!) and to trade ideas back and forth with my sister, Weez, who is even more passionate about Pinterest than I am!
• I am not too focused (yet) on building a following or following a lot of people as I mostly use it for my own reference and utilize keyword searches to find images that relate to what I need. As I begin to make more of my own products within my business, I expect that will change.

Instagram
I was very late to the game on Instagram, mostly because I was a bit freaked out when Facebook stated they would begin selling Instagram images for their own profit with no attribution to the people who created the images. After many people, some quite famous, abandoned and closed their accounts, Facebook quickly changed its tune.

I got into it about 2 months ago because it did seem like a fun platform to use and I wanted to share with the world more of the pictures I actually take. (Admittedly, I have just a *few* photos of my adorable pup Phineas!) It’s kind of like a visual diary of places I go and things I see. I mostly use Instagram mostly for fun and not much for work, but that could change in the future as I get more familiar with the platform and Facebook provides new functionality.

Putting it together
With these two platforms, I’m really trying to improve my visual thinking and visual explanation skills. So far, it’s been fun to play around with these and I have seen vast improvements in my design work as I spend more time with visual content. If you use these platforms, I’d love to hear what they’ve done for you!