Using Pinterest to Plan your Next Trip
Do you use Pinterest? Did you know you can use it for trip planning? Elizabeth from Compass & Fork, provides a guide to get you started using Pinterest for planning and researching your journeys…
For the sake of this article, let’s assume you’re new to Pinterest. Pinterest is a visual search engine. Just like you search on Google or any other search engine by typing in your keywords, you can do the same in Pinterest, only it returns matching pictures! And the pictures link to information from around the internet.
Getting Started in Pinterest
Here’s the short version of the lingo to get you started. A helpful analogy is imagining a bulletin board on your wall where you cut and collect articles from magazines, postcards, or anything of interest to you. Pinterest has:
- Boards- the equivalent of a bulletin board, each user can have many, one for each subject or area of interest, i.e. Spain, Mongolia, Recipes, Places to Visit.
- Pins- an individual entry, a picture and a link to something on the internet. The same as something you pin on your bulletin board.
- Pinners- account holders.
That’s it, you are ready to go. (It is free to open an account at www.Pinterest.com)
So now let’s plan your trip
Open your account, create and name a board, and then use the Pinterest search bar to enter your destination. For an example, let’s say you want to go to Spain. Enter in “Spain” and the search returns any pins with Spain in their description. Just scan through the pictures and find the pins you like and re-pin them to your own board. Remember, each pin links to an article. It is similar to bookmarking or saving a link on the internet, but done using pictures not text.
You may just be searching now and return later to read the articles. Or you may want to just start reading and save the ones you like and find helpful.
Each pin has a description; you can edit or add to this description to make it more meaningful to you.
Finding More Pins
Some boards and pinners are well established and have boards with thousands of pins!
If you find someone pinning a lot about Spain or a board you really like you can “follow” either the pinner or the board. This means any additional pins appear in your “stream” when you return to Pinterest and you can add them to your “Spain” board. This also makes it easy to return later if you need additional information. Have a question about the pin? You can leave a comment on the pin.
Download the Pinterest toolbar for your browser, and as you find other things on the internet you can pin them direct to your boards.
Mapping Your Itinerary
From your general Spain board you can create a subset for your itinerary and move or copy the pins you like onto a new board, for example Spain 2016 Trip. If you don’t want everyone to see your board you can make it “secret” when you create the board. There is also an option to enable mapping. With mapping enabled, you can add a location to the pin, thus creating a visual map with all of your pins, an easy way to create your itinerary.
Using Pinterest to plan your next trip lets you leverage the searching and curating for many locations already done by millions of users. It’s a quick, easy and a visual way to start researching your trip.
You can find Elizabeth on Pinterest at https://www.pinterest.com/compassnfork/
