How many pins does it take to nail down a job? Temple sophomore and advertising major Brittany Cozzens may have found the answer. Her huge following of three million followers on Pinterest caught the attention of Hello Society, a company based in Santa Monica, CA that specializes in Pinterest marketing for businesses.
“They basically work solely with Pinterest,” Cozzens said of Hello Society. “They saw it as a huge opportunity as far as branding, because it’s a new social media platform.”
The company contacted her this past November through LinkedIn, when her following was at two and a half million. Now, Cozzens works for them.
“It’s a bunch of little [businesses] combined in one website, and I’m pinning for them,” Cozzens said. “I really like that because I feel like I’m helping people actually build their businesses.”
Cozzens said that she also really appreciates the freedom Hello Society allows her.
“They don’t tell me what to pin,” she said. “They offer me campaigns, and they don’t tell me which ones I have to take or don’t take. Everything is up to me.
Graphic designer and skateboarding personality Brooks Duvall and one knitting company also contacted Cozzens for about advice on furthering their brands on Pinterest. She was unable to work for them, however, because she would be breaching her contract with Hello Society.
Hello Society seems to be keeping her busy enough anyway.
“I’m probably on my computer a couple of hours a day just doing that. It really does take a lot of thought to make sure I’m doing stuff for my followers, not just for me anymore, and that I’m pleasing my company, too.”
Other than using Pinterest to work in advertising, Cozzens also focuses on graphic design, as she wants to focus her major in Art Direction. She looks to her designing boards for “inspiration” as a designer for the Temple Ad Club.
Cozzens once had a thousand pins on one board, and said she recently she began splitting them up to make it easier.
“If I want something on like packaging, I need to look at just packaging and not everything else,” she said. Now she has boards for prints and typography, logos, business cards, resumes, and so on.
While her wedding board is her favorite, Cozzens expressed great pride in her tattoo board as well. She said it could have been largely responsible for her newfound popularity on the site.
“Pinterest has a [more broad] range of categories now,” she said. “Tattoos wasn’t one of them before. Sometimes I just like to think that maybe I had something to do with that.”
Pinning tattoos was something she started in high school when she first created her Pinterest account after the recommendation of her hairdresser. Now, her followers have topped three million.
Cozzens said she can’t explain exactly why she has had such success with followers.
“That is the one question that everybody asks me. How did you get them, and why are they following you? I literally have no idea.”
She said she did not even know how large her following was until Hello Society called her in November and told her that she was “in the top 200 most followed people in the world on Pinterest.”
Of this, Cozzens said, “They told me the number and I was like, that’s not right.”
She said her followers on other social media are not nearly as numerous. She uses Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more private sharing, and was contacted by Hello Society through LinkedIn.
Cozzens is now working on her own website, brittanycozzensdesigns.com, which she hopes will be up by the end of the summer.
“I’m trying not to put anything up until everything is officially completed,” Cozzens said. “So it can be done all at once.”
Cozzens is also a camp counselor, a freelance designer, and will be an RA in Morgan Hall this coming fall.
When asked where she hopes her success on Pinterest and work at Hello Society will take her, she said that her “dream job” is completely tied to her new employer. She has had the opportunity to network with others who are involved in both Pinterest and the field of advertising.
“It’s interesting working for the company with people that [I] don’t really know,” Cozzens said. “But they’re probably one of the kindest groups of people I’ve ever met. I think [their company’s intentions]—for not only their company and their influencers like me, but for their brands— is awesome.”
Mellisa Pascale can be reached at mellisa.pascale@temple.edu.
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