5 More Content Lessons from Quinoa's Pinterest Fashion Board

You never know where your content marketing lessons will come from these days. One of my friends in the social media world retweeted a blog post about a very interesting Pinterest board, and now I have some thoughts to share on the subject myself. Inspiration!

The subject of this lesson is a Pinterest fashion board about a pint-sized fashion-plate named Quinoa and her very well-dressed little friends.

You can read the story of Quinoa here, but here's the executive summary: While brilliant and funny, the entire board is fake - it is simply fashion photos of little girls and boys, with funny age-appropriate captions written from an adult's point-of-view.

"My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter" is the modest creation of Tiffany Beveridge, a copywriter from Philly and mother of two boys, who was having fun with it as a way to indulge her fashion itch in a house of shorts and t-shirts. When the week started, she had about 100 followers.

Today the board has 20,700 and counting.

What happened??

Here's what: The board caught the eye of Ann Handley, the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, who has 197,000 marketing-savvy Twitter followers, and she wrote a blog post about it. As Ann wrote in her post, virality happened, and in short order, Beveridge's board was being passed around and enjoyed by thousands.

For starters, I hope it gets Beveridge lots of good gigs. She's got talent.

Ann's post contained some good lessons from this episode. Here are five more:

1. Nothing beats getting picked up and shared by someone with 200,000 followers. Or by anyone with a lot more followers than you. That's the brass ring of Twitter and by extension, social media. How does that happen? Create shareable content.
2. What's shareable? As Ann points out, this board is shareable because it is funny, doesn't take itself seriously, and has a clear voice and point-of-view. It's also not the creation of a for-profit business, which gives Beveridge creative license (It's not so easy for a real brand with real (cranky) bosses to pull this off). But the lesson is that you have no choice if you want to interact with people via social media, rather than just posting and hoping someone finds your content via search.
3. What you CAN do: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple. Simpler. Simplify. Am I clear?
4. Here are some ways you can make your otherwise dry content simple and shareable: bulleted lists, person-on-the-street interviews, slideshows. 
5. The Internet is good at identifying talent, but it does take persistence and some luck. But if you are creating content that is largely non-promotional and gives someone else a chuckle or an insight, and you keep at it, you will build an audience.