Pinterest is a social network like no other. It allows you to be collaborative, curate interesting information, fuel a baking or shopping addiction, and promote your business all in one. If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, our Pinterest Glossary should clear things up for you.

Now that you’re caught up with the jargon, let’s take a look at the basics of Pinterest and what you need to know as you’re just starting out.

Getting started with Pinterest is easy! Sign up for a business account or convert your personal Pinterest profile into a business page. This will unlock analytical data and allow you to promote your pins.

Fill out your profile completely! Include a photo, bio, location, and web address. This will help people find you and also recognize you as a legitimate business.

Now, set up your boards. Think of the topics that are associated with your business and create boards for them. If you’re a flower shop, you’ll want boards highlighting your flower arrangements and how to care for flowers, but you’ll also want to think of other things that people would associate with giving flowers: gift ideas, holiday decor inspiration, color combinations, etc. If you run a jewelry store, you’ll want to showcase your jewelry, but also some ideas surrounding jewelry: cleaning jewelry, types of gems, unique jewelry design. You get the idea.

Because Pinterest is a visually-driven engine, you want to make sure your photo game is sharp. Photos that are oriented portrait (instead of landscape) do best. The ideal size for a photo is 735 pixels wide by 1002 pixels tall. Pinterest will automatically adjust your photo to that width and the appropriate height for your photo. Socially Sorted has a great Pinterest image size cheat sheet for other photo dimensions, like your profile photo.

Photos that are bright and nicely styled do well on Pinterest. Make sure a photo that you’re pinning is lit properly, has plenty of white space or breathing room around the subject, and is visually appealing.

Because Pinterest is a social media network, you have to be social and interact. Pinterest operates with a Smart Feed meaning you don’t see the most recent content at the top (like Twitter), you see the most popular content and things you’re likely to find interesting based on your activity (like Facebook). This is why it’s important to interact; the more you pin and comment on others’ pins, the more valuable a user Pinterest considers you. This makes it more likely you’ll appear at the top of your followers’ feeds.

Be sure to follow your vendors, other businesses in the area, publications or bloggers who are in your niche or use your products, and even your competitors.

Pin in the evening after dinner when customers will be scrolling through on their phones during prime time commercial breaks. Saturday and Sunday mornings are also high traffic times for Pinterest, so be sure to capitalize on all of those eyeballs.