If you’re looking to use Pinterest as a vehicle to drive traffic back to your website, then great! Pinterest has climbed the ranks of top social media sites in the past year, and it’s easy to see why. Its scrolling bulletin-board layout is intuitive and beautiful, and feeds into our need for digesting content quickly and easily.
It’s easy to recognize which pins are good, because they automatically stand out when you see them on your feed. But, creating and crafting an effective pin is a different story. You could be offering the best and most valuable information out there, but if your pin isn’t “pinteresting”, then you can kiss your chances of getting traffic good-bye.
So, what’s in a good pin? Here are the three most important features in an anatomy of a good “pin”:
- Attractive Picture: Your picture is the first thing that grabs people’s attention, so use this to your advantage! Take some time to find or create a quality picture to use for your pin. You can use free web-based image editors like www.picmonkey.com to add in filters or text. Crop your picture appropriately, and make sure its width doesn’t exceed 554 pixels, or else Pinterest will stretch and warp your image.
- Descriptive Text: If your title is short enough to squeeze into your picture, do it. If not, use the description box to write a succinct brief about what your pin is about. Be persuasive—write about why should people click on your pin, or what value does it add to people’s lives?
- Proper Links: The purpose of pins is to redirect people to an external site where they can find what they were looking for. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t “pin” properly, redirecting their pins to just an image link or worse, a dead URL. How can you gain traffic if people don’t know where to go? Take time to double check your pins to make sure that they’re linking back to the right content.
Are you using Pinterest to drive traffic to your site?
