Meet Brittany Cozzens, Temple student with 3M+ Pinterest followers [Q&A]

Build an audience and use that as your job interview.

Thanks to her her three million-strong following on the image-based social network, Brittany Cozzens landed a job as a “Pinterest Tastemaker” for Pinterest marketing firm Hello Society in Santa Monica.

For context, one of Lowes‘ Pinterest boards has 3.5 million followers and Mashable named it the fifth most popular brand board on the social networking site. Cozzens probably knows a lot about “the perfect Pinterest photo.”

Of course, Cozzens is far from the first person to leverage personal social media for work with a brand — we just met Ryan Werner, who got a gig at University City-based visual analytics shop Curalate after courting them on Twitter and Facebook.

But this act just seems to happen earlier and earlier in the pipeline.

Cozzens, a 19-year-old advertising major at Temple University and York, Pa. native, talked to Technically Philly about what it’s like to “pin” for a male audience, how advertising groups seem to ignore Pinterest and how she’s single-handedly paying off her college loans with her social media job.

You have over three million followers. When you realized that, how did you feel?

I actually didn’t really know how many followers I had until an agency [Santa Monica-based Hello Society] contacted me and they told me. It’s just kind of interesting because I’d been using it in high school and I knew I was getting more followers. I just didn’t pay much attention to it until they called me.

What does it mean to be a Pinterest ‘Tastemaker?’ Has this changed what kinds of things you pin as opposed to what you were doing before?

I work with Hello Society, and they are a Pinterest tech firm. They came up with this huge insight database specifically for Pinterest for companies to track how they are doing, what pins are doing the best, see trends and get data from that. Where I come in is they give me all of these options of websites to pin from, and I can accept campaigns or decline them if I don’t like them. They don’t make me pin anything specific. It’s whatever I want and completely up to me, which I really like.

I saw that you try to pin for both genders. How do you anticipate what guys want to see on Pinterest?

That’s kind of hard for me because all of the statistics show that it is mostly women [on Pinterest]. In the future, I think it will be bigger and more diverse as far as the male followers go. I definitely have to think about that a lot, but I do feel bad sometimes because some people’s news feeds get overloaded with my stuff and if it’s a guy following me, I don’t want them to unfollow me for having all of these dresses and cute shirts, so I try to work it out with quirky stuff or stuff for your home, a lot of prints or beer stuff. I always ask my boyfriend, “Does this look right?”

How much time do you spend on Pinterest a day?

I probably spend about two or three hours a day, so it has turned into more than a hobby. It is a lot, and especially now that I am getting more followers, I’m trying to keep things updated because I know I have all of these followers and they want to see more.

Where do you get most of your pins? 

For Hello Society, I use the websites I pick and I pin products from there. Sometimes they have special instructions on them, like “Don’t pin from the sale racks” or “Only new arrivals” — they want their new products to get out.

Do you still pin stuff that you see that you like [outside of your job]?

Definitely. [But] I don’t feel like I have time now to pin stuff otherwise because I have three jobs.

Do you plan to keep Pinterest as a part of your future career?

Definitely. It is really helping me single handedly pay off my student loans, so I’m fine with that. It’s definitely fun. [Having] your hobby turn into a job — you couldn’t really want more than that. I don’t have to get dressed up or go anywhere. I just need my computer and myself.

As an advertising major do you use Pinterest or learn ways to use it for advertising?

It’s funny for me because I’m in the Temple Ad Club and a bunch of different advertising  groups besides my classes. They keep talking about network[ing] all the time and LinkedIn and, “You need to know how to use Twitter and Facebook” and all this stuff, but the one social media site they never ever mention is Pinterest. It is interesting to me because if you really want to show someone who you are and describe your style there is no better way to do that than pictures of things that you like.

Do you get recognition or do any of your professors or classmates know about your Pinterest presence?

No one really knows about it. I don’t really like to talk about it in class because I don’t really want to draw any special attention to myself or have it come up over and over again. I don’t want to annoy people because sometimes I feel like I’m annoying people who see it on my Facebook page. I feel bad sometimes. I don’t want to overload people with it. I try to stay modest and humble.

I just say I have an online job.