Pinterest for musicians: level up your marketing game

Pinterest could best be defined as a digital bulletin board where users create ‘Pins’ - posts in a form like an image or a video - for other users to save into one of their ‘Boards’. Furthermore, each pin links back to the website where they were originally uploaded, meaning that you, as a musician, can easily link your fans to your official website, online store, music streaming service or any other social media platforms.

In spite of the perception of the platform being less popular than other channels such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, Pinterest, in fact, has currently over 440 million monthly active users which outnumbers platforms such as Twitter or Reddit. The network may also have a greater influence than you think. That’s because most of the audience are also users of other social media networks, with almost 83% also using Facebook, the most popular social platform, and 86% also using Instagram. This means that your Pinterest followers and fans are more than likely to connect with you and ‘talk’ about you via their Facebook and Instagram accounts, too.

What’s more, Pinterest could be considered as the social media queen of positivity. With clearly defined guidelines, the network relies on content moderation and insists on keeping negativity off the platform. Such an approach seems to resonate well with the Pinterest audience as 8 in 10 users actually say that the platform makes them feel positive. This fosters an even more positive environment for musicians to tap into and utilize as a promotional tool since many music consumers look to music for positivity.

Signing up for a business account on Pinterest is an important first step in your music promotion on the platform. A Pinterest business account, which is free, will grant you access to various sales-oriented features within the platform. Not only will you be able to sell things, such as your merchandise, via Pinterest, but you’ll also be able to run ads, access rich Pins (that will offer more information about your landing page than regular Pins), or benefit from the analytic features and metrics.

Now that your Pinterest account is all set up, it’s about time to establish your strategy and start pinning! We’ve listed some tips on what steps to take to use Pinterest to effectively promote your work of art.

As a marketing strategy, your Pinterest marketing should be a part of your bigger social media strategy with the general aim to create awareness, reach a new audience and eventually drive traffic to your website or online store to sell your music, merchandise or concert tickets.

However, as a musician it’s valuable to define your personal goals more clearly and create content based on them. Try to be as specific as possible regarding the relevance and attainability of your goals, the measurement of their success, and the time span during which you’d like to see some results.

The way to start pinning content is to first create Pinterest boards - a minimum of 10 to populate your profile. Just like your posts and the profile, your Pinterest boards should have a detailed description focused on keywords to help you work on SEO.

The boards should focus on music-related content and can center around topics like concerts and gigs, music videos, backstage photos and videos, playlists (of course) and blog articles, or, even, some motivational music quotes. Don’t forget that Pinterest is very hyped about positivity and is popular among people that seek inspirational and motivational content.

Furthermore, it’s important to consider the format of your pins and their quality. As it’s been shown, more than 80% of Pinterest users actually use the platform on their phones. You should therefore aim for vertical posts with the 2:3 aspect ratio. Although Pinterest is mostly associated with images, the popularity of videos is rising considerably with almost one billion videos being watched every day. You can therefore focus on uploading different forms of content - from pictures, to videos, to carousels and photo montages.

With the correct link embedded to your image or video, Pinterest users and your followers can always be linked back to a particular online location, whether it’s your website, online store, or Bandcamp or Spotify account.

As users can repin your posts with the location link into their page, new followers can be navigated to your pages at any time, driving more traffic and engagement.

Pinterest works on the basis of a search engine and keywords in the pins’ description, boards, and hashtags therefore play an important role.

Detailed descriptions with specific keywords can help you reach and engage with your target audience and increase the likelihood that your pins come up when users look for a particular genre or type of music-related content.

Just like with other social media networks, tracking your performance and analyzing your audience can help you be more effective and successful with your Pinterest marketing strategy.

With the Pinterest analytics tool, you can measure metrics such as impressions, engagements, saves, or outbound clicks and analyze your standard, idea, product, and video pins based on the content type, device, and audience demographics such as age and gender. Pinterest also provides conversion insights measuring the impact of your content on your conversions.

Creating boards and filling them up with pins all at once will not be much of a support to your music promotion. Pinning consistently and regularly, a few times a week, will on the other hand, help you continuously reach a new and wider audience.

What can help with your pinning, are various free and affordable scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite, Buffer or Tailwins. With those tools, you can schedule your pins in advance and make sure you’ll stay consistent.