Pinning or Adding to Pinterest

At the top of your Pinterest page you will see a header, with the word Add, if you click on that you will see the following window:

 To add a link, just hover over add a pin,

 that will open the following window:

just type or past the link to the site you would like to pin, you'll see the next window, where you can decide where to pin your image:

Then you can give your pin a good description, which will encourage others to repin your pin.

Uploading a Pin

You can also click on the Add button and you will be able to hover over Upload a Pin:

This will allow you to upload an image from your computer. Again, you will see the following window:

just type or past the link to the site you would like to pin, you'll see the next window, where you can decide where to pin your image:

Then you can give your pin a good description, which will encourage others to repin your pin.

Pinterest: Setting up your boards

When you first create a Pinterest profile you begin with some pre-titled boards--shown above.You can rename these boards, or delete them altogether and create your own boards. Below you can see some of the boards I created:

How do you Pinterest?

Above is as screenshot of my Pinterst home page. You can write your own profile, I have chosen a photo of a cactus and a brief description of my lack of design/crafty talents. As you can see I have 21 boards, with 861 pins, 143 folks are following all of my activities, with over 300 folks following my EI Ideas board. The first step is find other users you know, either through email or Facebook. You can then begin pinning, which is what Pinterest is really all about!

Finding others to Follow

If you link your Pinterest site to your email and/or facebook you will be notified whenever a friend joins Pinterest, and you can decide to follow all or some of their boards. The list of potential friends to follow will show up on the lefthand side of your Pinterest dashboard. This sidebar will let you know who has begun following you, or following one of your boards and who has repinned your pins!

Pinterest

Pinterest really comes out of the design world. Users have boards, think inspiration boards or bulletin boards. Onto which they "pin" images. You can follow other users, their individual pins or just repin their finds to your own boards. When you first join you start with some generic boards, onto which you can pin your first finds. You can also create your own boards, with their own names. The fun is watching what is hot and popular (more on that later). I am using some of my boards to collect ideas around early intervention and assistive technology, as you may be able to see here: http://pinterest.com/caseywaid/ei-ideas/

Popular Pins

One can find, that like Alice you drop into a rabbit hole when hanging out on Pinterest, so beware! You can view all pins, or search by categories, you canget lost, nah sucked into viewing loads of boards and pins! 

Once I realized that I wanted to collect pins that reflected images around early intervention and assistive technology I first searched the kids section. There I found many other images from OTs, PTs, and SLPs and teachers. I went back to some of my tried and true websites and started pinning those images as well.  And then I thought, wait a second, I am repinning from others, why not invite those folks to pin to my board?  And you should see how it has exploded, at last count I have up to 300 followers on some of my boards and I'm not doing all of the work!   

Here's a shot of my EI Board, which you can follow here: http://pinterest.com/caseywaid/ei-ideas/

Are you using Pinterest?  If so, I'd like to follow you and read about what you are doing with your boards.

Twitter

Twitter can be updated with content on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis.  You should develop a plan that details the minimum frequency of updates. 

Twitter is very fast moving.  One can interact quickly with large groups of people.  Twitter can also increase your interactions, drive up awareness of your existence.  Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, though it is a good idea to aim for 120 characters to enable others to retweet or share your post.  Twitter users expect abbreviations and shorthand when tweeting, though it is important to review tweets before posting to insure that they cannot be misinterpreted or misread. 

Twitter hashtags

Twitter uses hashtags to sort and organize tweets.  Here are some current hashtags that are relevant to early intervention:

#B25, #ece, #earlyed, #PartC, #PartCIDEA,  #prek, #parenting, #autism, #assistivetech, #spedchat, #education, #specialneeds, #disabilities, #sped, #at, #cpchat, #edpolicy, #earlychildhood

It is important to note that hashtags are constantly being added/revised.  For instance, a hashtag for this conference might be:  #2012MEIC or #MEIC2012 or even #MEIC12.

Twitter posts are most often retweeted from 8-11am EST and from 1-3pm EST.  Similar to Facebook, it is important to parse out tweets, so that you don’t overload your followers.  However, one can post the same post repeatedly on twitter as the stream moves so fast that repeats are often the only way to be seen.

Hands-free Tweeting

One way to take advantage of what we know about twitter is to use an app to schedule tweets.  There are many out there, three popular apps:  Socialoomph, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.