Until the beginning of last year I’d been hoarding things that inspired me as starred items in Google Reader. Then came Pinterest. It was like someone had read my my mind and I could finally see everything at once, look through my links easily for inspiration and find something I’d pinned months ago in seconds.
But the thing that’s been bugging me the past few months is…
“How do I separate personal and business pins without getting confused or having to constantly log in and out of different accounts?”
Thankfully I’ve found a solution and I wanted to share it with you!
I have two businesses, Mariposa and Bright by Design. People interested in one might not necessarily be interested in the other, and potential clients, customers or blog readers might only want to see pins related to that area.
Nice as my cake recipes are, someone who needs help with their branding and logo probably isn’t thinking about baking. Or alternatively they’ll start thinking about baking and get completely distracted from what they were intending to do… which was get in touch with me and use my services (That’s not good for business!!!)
Having your business and personal pins muddled together isn’t just distracting for customers, it’s annoying for you too. You don’t want to waste time repinning all the pins you’ve pinned so far. You also don’t want to have to maintain two or three Pinterest accounts. Constantly logging in and out is incredibly frustrating – trust me I’ve tried!
So how can you easily maintain two or three Pinterest accounts?
When you edit a Pinterest board you’ll notice that you can add another person to Pin to that board. If you have all your boards in one account and then create sub-accounts you can pin to all your boards and populate other accounts without having to log in to each one individually. Awesome.
For example…
All my boards are in my helenthornber Pinterest account. I also have a brightbydesign account and a mariposadev account.
The boards I think are of interest to people who want to develop their business brand, improve their website or design something promotional I share with mariposadev.
The boards related to parties, weddings and events I share with brightbydesign.
But I can pin to all of them from helenthornber – brilliant and easy!
Here are the instructions to get set up…
These are the easy steps to set up a separate business Pinterest account to share with your customers. I will refer to your personal Pinterest account as your home account and your business account as your work account.
1. When logged into your home account, hover over you name/profile picture in the top right corner and click ‘invite friends’. Enter your work email and click ‘Send’ then follow the instructions to set up a new account.
2. Follow the link in the email to set up a work account. When you’re done, follow your home account and then log out.
3. Log in as your home account.
4. Click on ‘Edit’ below any board in your home account that you would also like to show up in your work account. You’ll notice at just above ‘Save Settings’ there’s a ‘Who can pin?’ option.
5. In the ‘Add another pinner’ box type the name of your work account (not the account name – the actual first name and surname you used to set up the account). Click on your work account when it shows up and click ‘Add’. Pinterest will automatically send an invite to your work account (you don’t even have to click save!)
6. Repeat the above for every board you’d like to share with your work account. Then log out of your home account.
We’re almost done I promise… it’s easy from here on in!
7. Log into your work account and go to your boards and you’ll see invitations. Click ‘Accept’ on each one. Now rearrange your boards into the order you want. Then log out of your work account.
Now you can log in to your home account as normal and pin away, knowing that all your lovely pins will be showing up in your business Pinterest account for those lovely potential customers to browse and be inspired by!
You can follow me on Pinterest…
mariposadev for brand and design inspiration
brightbydesign for party, event and wedding inspiration
helenthornber for all the above and everything else!!!
Do you have any questions about using Pinterest for business? Leave them in the comments and I’ll do my very best to answer them!
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Yep! You’ve cracked it!
Thank you, very helpful…
I want to play on Pinterest now, but I have too much work to do – bah!
Glad it’s helped! And when you do get time to play on Pinterest let me know if you have any other questions about it, I’m a bit of a Pinterest addict!
This is such a fabulous find- but I’m at an impasse. It’s forcing me to use Facebook to sign in with the new account, but as all of my Facebook accounts are under my “home” email, it’s not working. Any suggestions? This is a perfect solution if I can find a workaround to this.
Thanks so much,
Beth Carson
Hi, I had the same issue as you a few months back. I emailed them (from the email address I wanted to log in with) to ask them to remove the link with my Facebook account and let me login with that email address. It seems they now have a support page at https://support.pinterest.com/anonymous_requests/new where you can send them a message about the issue and ask them to unlink Facebook from your account. I hope that helps!
Helen
Hi Helen, I have a personal account and I just started another account (with a different email) for my blog. I didn’t use my first and last name when setting up the account because I want it to show my blog name, Real Small Estate. When I try to add my Real Small Estate as another pinner to the boards on my personal account, I get the message “username not found.” How did you set up your account for “Bright by Design” so that Pinterest recognizes your name?
Thanks,
Sally
Hi Helen, sorry, I just figured it out! I have to follow my blog account and vice versa in order for the name to show up when I want to add a pinner.
Thanks anyway
Sally
Hi Sally! Sorry for my delayed reply! I’ve been out of the office for a few days. Names are a confusing thing in Pinterest! It also doesn’t let you search for people by the URL identifier e.g. if you’re on Twitter you can search @mariposadev or Helen Thornber and you’ll find me, but on Pinterest you can only find pinterest.com/mariposadev by searching for Helen Thornber NOT mariposadev. I hope they improve this soon so that you can search by both URL name & user name.
Glad you got it sussed though!
This….. this is bona fide genius!!
Thank you, I’m glad you’ve found it useful! If you have any other questions about Pinterest just ask, and I’ll do my best to answer.