Remember back in the day when we would look through magazines and clip out the pictures and articles that we liked and put them on a bulletin board in our bedrooms? Well, Pinterest is a website that lets you do an online version of just that very thing. You create different boards and you pin anything that you find of (p)interest. It’s that simple! And organized! And visual!

There’s also a social aspect of Pinterest… your boards are public so other people can view them, follow them, repin something onto their boards, comment, like or share your pins on FB/Twitter. The Pinterest culture is all about identifying things that you like and allowing other people to see them. At first glance, it looks like all it is is a collection of pictures but it’s not… the picture may be a place holder for a link to valuable information. The every eloquent Carolyn Dachinger puts it this way:

It is one thing to tell me to check out a link, it’s another to show me a picture of what it is to pique my interest thus, pinterest.

- Carolyn Dachinger

So what can Pinterest do for a music therapist?

Pinterest can help you:

• Find session resources.Rachel Smith is a virtuoso at doing this. She has a ‘Music Therapy Private Practice’ board where she has different office organization ideas, an ‘Instruments’ board showing different instruments she finds interesting (many of which are DIY instructions) and, my favorite board… a ‘Session Ideas’ board that holds a mother load of free printable resources, visual aids, and various other activities.
• Organize blog posts that you want to read. I show you how to do that in this video.
• Keep things without having them clutter up your actual bulletin board. As in, you don’t have to do it the back-in-the-day way anymore. Or buy magazines. Or use scissors. I feel good knowing that I can go in excess saving things that I may or may not access again in the vast space of the internet and not have to look at it on a daily basis like the pile of mail I look at every day just sitting on my table.
• Increase your blog traffic. If you have a blog and you care about that sort of thing. Pinterest can create a lot of referral source traffic for you. I just read this article on ProBlogger where Darren Rowse noticed that was happening to him. So, I checked it out for the MT Tween and yes, in fact, Pinterest is on my referral source list. Pretty cool since that means that people looked at a blog post of mine from Pinterest.com and I didn’t have to do anything! (Which also shows that you may want to make it a point to have an image in every blog post you publish.)
• Find encouragement.Create yourself a ‘smile’ board (or whatever works for you) and pin something that makes you feel good (and smile ). I have a tangible ‘smile’ folder where I’ve saved different cards, pictures, etc from clients through the years. Now I have a digital smile folder. It doesn’t have anything from clients on it (of course!) but I find that it gives me the similar feeling. Here’s my smile folder.
• Relax. That’s what it does for me! I love sitting on the couch after work and look at the different boards listed in the ‘everything’ area (the humor board in particular).

So, that’s my take on Pinterest. You can check out all of my boards here.

Ready to join? Just leave me a comment and I’ll send you an invite.

Are you already pinning? What do you think?

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