A New Way To Market With Pinterest: Secret Boards

Pinterest exploded onto the social networking scene earlier this year, and it quickly became a goldmine for business owners and marketers.

Pinterest lets users create and share their own inspiration boards that cover everything from event planning to home decorating. Marketers love how content spreads virally on the network, with users “repinning” images and ideas to their own boards.


Now there’s another reason for marketers and business owners to love Pinterest: secret boards. Pinterest is rolling out the option to create private boards that only you – or people you specify – can see. So what’s the big deal?

Shhhh! It’s A Secret!

Until now, everything posted to Pinterest was public. If you wanted to collect gift ideas, plan a surprise party or even just save articles for personal reading later, it all got shared publicly across the network.

Thanks to secret boards, you can now keep a private stash of ideas for whatever you need. Secret boards are obviously handy for personal use – holiday gift lists coming to mind first.

But They Can Also Help Your Marketing

Here are some ways your business can take advantage of Pinterest’s new secret boards:

Planning A Campaign Before It Goes Public

Pinterest is an excellent way to collect inspiration all in one place and save images to use later in your campaigns. And with a secret board, you can plan an entire marketing campaign while keeping the details under wraps until you launch it.

As you come across brilliant marketing ideas and inspirational images across the web, you can pin them to your secret board using Pinterest’s special Pin It button. This will save the image – and its corresponding website link – to your board so you can reference it later.

Pin design and copy ideas for a special email campaign, gather ideas for a redesign of your website, or just make sure your Pinterest board is perfect before sharing it with your community. You get the benefit of neatly organizing your ideas and marketing inspiration without anyone else seeing what you’re up to.

Sharing Ideas With Clients

Secret boards don’t have to be completely secret – Pinterest allows you to designate certain people who can also see your secret board. This can be an easy way to share ideas for your clients’ eyes only. Some businesses that may find this most useful:

  • Bakeries that design wedding cakes and confections for other special events. Create a secret board and invite your customers to pin their favorite cake ideas to it as you’re working with them. You can both share your cake decorating visions to create something really special.
  • Photographers can pin their best work along with other photos to suggest themes and poses for a photoshoot. Clients can also pin some poses they want to try.
  • Designers might want to create a personalized “mood board” for their clients, whether it’s a website overhaul or an interior redesign. Inspire your client with color schemes, furniture choices, textures and more.
  • Event planners can use a secret board to brainstorm themes, color schemes, decorations, entertainment and more for their clients’ events.

Collaboratively Planning An Event

Pinterest is the perfect place to gather ideas and inspiration for your next event. But if you’re hosting a big event at your business, you don’t want to get the word out too early, when it’s still in a rough planning stage.

Set up a secret board for your event, invite others you’re planning with to view and pin to the secret board and collect your ideas in one convenient place without the risk of outside eyes seeing your plans too early. You can delete the secret board after your event, or keep it for the next time you have an event to plan.

Keeping Tabs On Your Competition

You may already monitor what your competitors are up to online. But sometimes you may come across a great idea you wish you had yourself. Or maybe you want a better way to visually organize the trends within your industry. Secret boards are the perfect place to store and track information about your competitors. Keep it to yourself or share it with others in your business who would find the information valuable.

Cool! So How Do I Make One?

Secret boards are housed under your regular boards in your Pinterest profile (don’t have an account? Register for a free account here.):

Hover over one of the boxes in the “Secret Board” section to create a new secret board. Give it a name, categorize it, and other viewers and pinners if you wish.

For more help creating a secret board, check out Pinterest’s FAQ.

Want To Share A Secret?

Will you try Pinterest’s secret boards? How will you use them for your own business or email campaign? Share with us in the comments!

And download our free guide for more ways to market your business and products on Pinterest.

Download Guide

6 Comments

  1. Mary Corbet

    12/18/2012 10:55 am

    I’ve been using Pinterest’s Secret Boards for a while to gather inspirational stuff that have given me ideas for project development. I also keep some of my own images there (of my own work) that I want to share with others in my industry, but that I don’t want public yet. I hadn’t thought about using them to “hold” images before they go public or to plan a campaign before it goes public, but this is a really good idea – sounds like a great way to save time and to organize in advance.

    Too bad Pinterest doesn’t have a “schedule it” option for posting images. That would make pre-planning even easier!

  2. Randall Magwood

    12/18/2012 9:43 pm

    Great post. I’m not a Pinterest marketer as I always sticked with Facebook and Twitter. But now I see that I am missing out on a great deal of social traffic. Thanks for making Pinterest marketing clear for me.

  3. Eric Burnett

    12/18/2012 11:39 pm

    Thanks for sharing this article, I really love pinterest and it is one of my daily marketing sources. I really enjoyed this article and I received a great deal of value. Keep sharing quality information.

  4. Stan Tomaszewski

    12/23/2012 7:08 pm

    Thanks for the helpful information. I have been online for some time and seeing the definite need to be socially “connected” as many ways as possible, and see the value in pinterest. Thanks again!

  5. Steve

    12/29/2012 1:36 am

    As said in the article pinterest is a goldmine to many marketers. It also helpuful in the SEO strategies. Secret board is a great idea to implement. Thanks for sharing.

  6. Mike Smith

    1/8/2013 8:48 pm

    One of the things I like about Aweber is the helpful tips and ideas, I honestly don’t know where I would pick up so much information if it were not for these emails giving me the latest on Pinterest and facebook.
    great stuff, Thank you