Brands love Pinterest for the social network’s ability to drive sales, but did you know that the platform is also an effective tool for collaborating and planning behind-the-scenes? Pinterest’s secret boards are a relatively new feature that allows users to create private boards where only select people can view and collaborate.

For brands, these top-secret Pinterest boards provide a private forum to make a plan come together, or execute a fun and unique marketing campaign with the most loyal fans.

Now, Pinterest may have adopted a secrecy theme, but we aren’t keeping these ideas hush! Here are 6 unique and out-of-the-box methods brands can use Pinterest’s secret boards for.

1. Planning an event. Putting together a large event can be a stressful task and sometimes hard to coordinate with team members. Pinterest Secret Boards give brands a space to plan out an event by creating and sharing a board between the event’s team members, without revealing special event elements. Collaborators can share things like exciting drink recipes for the bar, decorations, potential vendors or plan memory worthy activities to do while attending, all away from the curious eyes of party goers.
2. Fine-tuning a marketing campaign. The secrecy of these boards provides an ideal forum for fine-tuning a marketing campaign that’s about to launch. Share internal creative direction on to get everyone on the marketing team on the same, eh, board!
3. Building consumer profiles. The pinning platform is a forum where users regularly share info on their desires, motivations, goals and who they truly are. Brands can use these secret panels to build consumer profiles, and figure out exactly who their target is. Define several archetypes and pin content to the respective board that showcases what that person is into!
4. Making a competitor analysis. These restricted boards make it possible for brands to get a direct competitive edge! Check out your competitors’ Pinterest pages and pin things to show what they’re doing right and wrong. By creating these private competitor analyses, team members can get an idea for what does and doesn’t work on the platform, but will also be able to see exactly where competitors stand.
5. Curating content. Pinterest’s undercover feature is an ideal place for a brand to develop a content curation strategy. High quality content curation will continue to be a key use for networks like Twitter and Facebook. Brands can build these collaborative spheres of content to internally share articles, blogs, videos, images, products, that are relevant to the brand and that followers on social media will find interesting.
6. Hosting a contest. While these hidden pinning boards provide a private and efficient forum for a team to collaborate internally, they are also a unique tool for brands to host contests. For example, designer Zac Posen could host a contest with the winning prize being an invitation to a board filled with sneak peaks of his Fall 2014 couture gown collection. (Zac Posen, no charge for the idea!)  By hosting a contest on a Pinterest’s hush-hush boards, brands can eliminate potential trolling and encourage more openness from contestants.

Pinterest’s secret boards are highly useful for brands looking to coordinate behind the scenes. The privacy and ability to collaborate with team members make the top-secret boards for brands a useful tool for anything that takes a bit of planning!