Advanced Pinterest Implementation Strategies
In our previous post titled “How to Leverage Pinterest for Your Brand or Company,” Felicity provided a great introduction to the emerging social media platform and virtual cork board. We saw that it can lead to some pretty large impacts on traffic and that it can be a great way to interact with customers. In this post, I share techniques that will get your site on more boards, gain you more followers, and put your pins at the top of Pinterest search results.
The Pin It Button for Websites
Incorporating the “Pin it” button into your website or blog will allow visitors to easily bookmark your site and share your images and pages with their network of followers. This could gain your site a lot of visibility and could lead to additional traffic. Also, there is always the potential for your content to go viral if Pinners decide to re-pin, Like, or Tweet pins of your site. An added benefit of integrating the Pin It button into your site is the option to choose the image to be pinned and the description of the pin.
To create your “Pin it” button, head over to Pinterest’s Goodies page and scroll down to the “Pin It” Button for Websites section. You’ll be greeted by the simple form above which allows you to customize your button. Once you fill out these fields, you can then copy the code and place it on your site to generate the button. Also, be sure to choose between the vertical, horizontal, and no count versions of the button. There is also an advanced button code, which allows you to place different versions of the button on one page of your site. This call-to-action button will encourage interaction and the sharing of your posts.
The Follow Button for Websites
To attract more followers to your Pinterest account, you can place a Follow Me On Pinterest button on your site. This button creator can be found on the same Goodies page of Pinterest. To create this button, all you have to do is login to the Pinterest account that you would like to create the button for, choose your favorite flavor of the Follow Button, and copy and paste the respective code into your site’s backend. This action could attract more followers, which could then lead to your pins getting more views.
WordPress Plugins for Pinterest
Numerous WordPress Plugins have been developed to even more easily incorporate the Pin It button into your site or blog’s posts and pages. The Pin It on Pinterest Plugin places a module into each post’s backend, allowing you to specify descriptions and images for each of your Pin it buttons all within the post editing screen and without having to mess around with any code at all. Similar plugins have started to make it to other platforms like Joomla!.
Pinterest Search Rankings
Now that we’ve covered how to implement Pinterest buttons on your site, I would like to share some tactics that could gain your pins and boards more views on Pinterest.com itself. One tactic to accomplish this is to optimize your Pins for Pinterest’s search function. Currently, Pinterest search results seem to be ranked based on keywords contained in the Pins’ descriptions, and to some degree, the number of Likes and Repins a Pin receives. As you can see in the search results above, it seems that incorporating additional instances of the targeted search term could lead to ranking higher in the search results. The top two results for the search “sweaters” returned two pins with “sweaters, sweaters, sweaters” in the description. You should definitely keep this in mind if you’re trying to rank for specific search terms in Pinterest.
Inspired Pinterest Boards
Similar to content creation strategies, shareability and user interaction goals should be pursued for each Pinterest board you create. Currently, many brands are leveraging boards to share their brand personality with Pinners, but boards can also be used to drive conversions. By creating boards that bring together related products into strategic collections, you could see results in your site’s revenue. For example, if you are in the DIY sector, you can create a board highlighting potential projects that link to products on your site. These pins could drive traffic to product pages of your site and lead to conversions. Another example of this strategy relates to the Fashion industry. Creating boards with curated outfits could lead to sales. In essence, your boards could be elevated to the level of inspired catalogs, which could drive a significant number of conversions. Yet, the possibilities for your Pinterest boards are almost limitless and should be approached as strategic opportunities to bring you closer to your online marketing goals or closer to your audience.
Pursuing these techniques should bring your brand or company additional visibility in Pinterest and could lead to some great results in your monthly traffic and conversion numbers. I encourage you to have fun experimenting with this new social media outlet and to measure the results your efforts have.