We are excited to bring you a guest post from Amy Fraughton,  owner of Photo Business Tools.

By now, we have all not only heard of Pinterest, but I am sure you have an account, and have been building your own dream boards with amazing recipes, eye makeup tutorials and even marketing tips!

But are you using it to help build your business? I have seen and heard many photographers getting great consistent traffic from their best images being pinned on Pinterest, and you should too. So today, we wanted to share with you 5 great tips to help you use this fast growing social media site to really grow your business!

1. Install Pin It Plug In

While blogging should be a regular part of what you do, you can easily get more exposure with your images on your posts by installing a plugin like this one for WordPress onto your blog. This plugin allows you to choose which image from your post will be posted and what the comment will be underneath the image. It also sits right below your post for you so that it is simple for your followers to pin your images.When your blog followers pin one of your images, it goes in front of all of their Pinterest followers, then if one of these followers re-pins the image, it goes in front of all of their followers, and no matter how many times your image is re-pinned, when someone clicks on it, it always brings them back to your blog/site.

2. Create Boards that fit your market’s interests

We all know it is outside of Pinterest’s guidelines to only pin yourself, not too mention totally tacky, so pin other’s things as well as your own. It’s a great idea to build boards that your clients are interested in. If you’re a Senior Photographer, you might want to create some boards on fashion or pop culture. If you’re a Wedding Photographer, you can do boards about décor, invitations, locations, and wedding rings. Within each of these boards, you can pin other’s work as well as your own.

One photographer created a board called “My Work” so that it was very clear to anyone visiting her Pinterest page that it was all hers. Then the other boards were full of images and ideas from other sites.

3. Send Your Clients To Your Pinterest Boards To Get Ideas

Now that you have a great collection of boards to help your clients, Pinterest can now be a great tool to help you in creating great images with your clients. Imagine this scenario. You have a client that wants to have you take their family pictures, but she is unsure of what to wear, and where to have their pictures taken. How great would it be for you to send her to your Pinterest boards, and search through your “Outfit Ideas” board and “Fab Locations” board. It not only helps your vision to be more in line with each other, but she may just start pinning some of your work that she loves too. Annddd… once she pins your work, it now goes in front of her followers, and well, you can see where this is headed, right?

4. Collaborate With Clients On A Board

A great way to fully use Pinterest is to collaborate with your clients on a board. If you have an upcoming shoot with a client that you want to be sure is absolutely incredible, you can add her as a contributor to a board that you create just for her shoot, and then both of you can pin things onto the same board. You might pin props that you like, compositions, locations, or whatever you/she sees that will inspire this upcoming shoot. This is a fantastic way to make sure you both have the same vision for the shoot. To add a contributor, simply click on the edit button on the board, then add their Pinterest name where it says; “Add another pinner”. That pinner will now be allowed to also pin to just that board.

5. Stay As Local As You Can

Just like with any social media site, it is fun to get a lot of followers, but the best followers are those that live right around you in your local community. To build exposure with your locals, then it’s a great idea to start following them. Find all of your friends on Pinterest, look for local businesses that have Pinterest accounts and follow them. Chances are great that as you are following them, they will follow you, and it’s a fantastic way to stay in front of people that are your target audience.

Amy Fraughton is owner of Photo Business Tools, and is committed to helping photographers find new clients, build more sales, and love the “business” side of things.

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In the comments below, let us know…are YOU on pinterest?  And, have you found effective ways to connect with clients there?

Sidenote: The Milky Way is on Pinterest now, where we’ll be posting display ideas, prop inspiration and more!  Follow us here