Thanks to Google Alerts, I was delighted to find the one of Elizabethtown College’s Pinterest boards made it into the post “20 Best College Pin Board Ideas for Pinterest” over at SaveDelete.com. This is a blog I hadn’t seen before, so I also was happy to find new reading material.
This post highlighted our board, “People of E-town” where we’ve, to date, pinned a few links leading to profiles, news articles and more related to individuals at the College—a nice mix of students and staff and faculty members.
Screen shot of a few boards at Elizabethtown College's Pinterest Page
From looking at the 19 other ideas, I found a few boards that are similar what we’re already doing (local recreation, global, careers, and relationships). But, what’s better is that I found some new ideas that I would love to try out for E-town’s Pinterest page. I especially liked Hanover College’s board, Major Profile, which links to stories/profiles about each major. I also love Multnamah University’s Eat for $5 board.
Elizabethtown College has been happily pinning since January 2012. Pinterest, I feel, is super fun and presents a nice way to visually organize information for a variety of campus audiences. There has been some convo on the higher ed circuit about to pin or not to pin… I say go for it if you have the time and manpower. Experiment, have fun. Of course, you may not want to detract from your main areas of social media focus, but consider using Pinterest to share useful, external content—and mix in some of your own web content. (I like to balance this as I don’t want our boards to just be links to our College website.) I really enjoy that fact that Pinterest ties to our Twitter account; this way, when we pin what we think is a great resource, we can also share it simultaneously on Twitter. Some of the articles I pin, I would have tweeted anyway, so now they get to go in two places with one click. I admit, though, that if I am going a little hog wild on pinning during one sitting, I don’t send them all to Twitter because I don’t want to spam our Twitter feed.
Also, if you want to see what other higher ed institutions are doing on Pinterest, check out this great post “Higher Ed Pinterest Examples and Directory” by Educational Marketing Group from a few months back.
How are you using Pinterest, either personally or professionally? What are some of the best boards you’ve seen? Share in the comments below.