My Love-Hate Relationship With Pinterest

In the past two years I’ve found myself spending more and more time on Pinterest and I don’t think I’m the only one. I found it quite funny when I hosted our baseball team party earlier this year and one of the kids (7 year old boy) asked my if I got my party decorating ideas from Pinterest – guess his mom is addicted to Pinterest too.

But as it gains popularity, I would have to say I’m developing a strong love-hate relationship with Pinterest.

what I love

• I read a LOT of blogs. And Pinterest makes it so easy to save things that interest me for when I might need them later
• Great for party or project planning. When I have a project I’m working on its so easy to search for ideas and keep them all in one place
• As a business owner and blogger, has been a great way to share my products and blog posts. This has been great for increasing business and traffic to my blog. Love the power of social media.

• I have no control over how my business photos are pinned and labeled. A lot of people use Pinterest to collect ideas with tutorials for projects they want to do. But I’ve had a lot of people pin my cake photos and label them DIY. Then I’ve had other people email and even call me to complain that there is no tutorial attached to the photo. These are my business photos for my cake business. These are cakes that I create for my customers. People have gotten very rude (yes I’ve even had people yell at me on the phone) because I won’t share this information – this my business and I just don’t have the time to spend helping someone create the design themselves (for free) when I have spent years taking classes and teaching myself how to create my designs.
• Spammers. Hate them. And technically I’m not sure if spammer is the right term here but you know what I mean. There are many websites out there trying to get traffic probably to get ad revenue. They steal photos from popular blog posts, place them on their website and pin them to pinterest. These then get repinned and they get the traffic to their site and not the blogger who spent the time creating the blog post and taking the photo. This makes me so mad. So please, when you repin something check the source and make sure the photo goes along with a blog post.
• Bad links – I’ve also seen a lot of people pin to a blog and not to the specific post. Once the blog post becomes older, it can be hard to find the post if you want the details. When I repin, I often like to read the post that goes along with it and get frustrated when I can’t find it. So another please, when you pin something from a blog, pin from the blog post and not the blog.