Going Viral on Pinterest: Driving Big Traffic and Making Pinterest a Real Marketing Solution

Posted by Colby Almond to Social Media

When I was first introduced to Digg in 2007 I didn’t leave the computer until I absorbed every piece of information that Kevin Rose made available to me. When I switched over to Reddit in 2008, I found the content even more enthralling and gave out upvotes until my fingers bled on nearly ever subreddit. A little over two months ago my girlfriend, Alaina was on her laptop on the couch totally enchanted by some type of site I had never seen before. However, I knew the passion and attention she was giving the site was all too familiar. There she was pinning and repinning content onto her boards like it was her job. As a marketer of nearly seven years, I absolutely knew this “Pinterest” thing was going to be huge. I never would have expected, however, that it would change the world of viral marketing so quickly.

It was during that month of January that Pinterest exploded from a casual social network to an absolute powerhouse of over 10 million users. By this point, it was driving more referral traffic than Google+, Youtube, and LinkedIn. For a social network remaining under the radar for the marketing industry, these are numbers that can’t be ignored.

The Power behind Pinterest

The best way to understand the power behind Pinterest is to compare it to the last ruler of viral traffic: The Front Page of Digg. We all remember the stunning days of 2007-2008 when reaching the front page of Digg was considered a milestone in your career. When developing content specifically for Digg was fun and actually reaching the front page was cause for celebration . . . and panic as your servers soon overloaded with traffic and eventually crashed. Those were fun times, indeed, and I have missed them ever since Digg’s mishap that resulted in a mass migration to other social networks.

I still remember my first Digg front page in 2008; I even printed it out and thought about framing it at that point in my career. Below is the actual data from my first three “Front Pagers” and what I thought would be the best traffic that I could ever drive to a website in a 24 hour time-frame.

In 2008 on a good day the front page of Digg could drive around 30-50 thousand visitors in a 24 hour time span. After the content was off the front page, it often disappeared into oblivion to never be seen again. That was the life of viral marketing back then and a lot of people have said since Digg’s demise that it would never be possible to reach those levels again.

However, I’m here to tell you that in the past two months I have not only reached those levels again, I have completely obliterated the old “Digg Effect”.

Below are the analytics from a single piece of content created for my personal site nearly over two weeks ago geared specifically towards Pinterest. As you can see, there’s a HUGE difference between the two.

Not only did this one piece of content nearly triple the traffic that was produced by the old Digg, but the average time spent on site is nearly 2 minutes and 43 seconds. This is exponentially better than the 12-13 seconds regular content is awarded from going viral on other social networks. The best part about going viral on Pinterest, however, is that once it hits its peak the traffic simply doesn’t stop. With the site’s growth in unique users and ability to “repin” and share, viral content will continue to bring in thousands of daily visitors for up to 3-4 weeks.

So how did I go about getting 46 thousand repins from one piece of content on my personal site? It’s all about the content, baby.

Understanding the Pinterest Community

When I started researching how to better understand the Pinterest community and its users I was met with some criticism. Being told “I’m revoking your man-card” or “you’re wasting your time” were the most frequent. However, as I soon began seeing results my peers began to ask me if I was casting some type of voodoo magic over the Pinterest users. I have played D&D before and I do have a set of dice, however, I am no magic user when it comes to Pinterest.It's not about knowing what women want, it's about knowing what the community wants.

The real secret to understanding the Pinterest community is this: IT’S JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER SOCIAL NETWORK. Just like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter . . . pictures of cute animals and memes run rampant. While there are some exceptions to this rule, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t see something from Reddit hit the popular page of Pinterest. Yes it’s true that throwing up a picture of Ryan Reynolds shirtless or of Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl-ing” a kitten will probably get you thousands of repins, it will never result in any traffic through to your site. The most important thing to remember is that the users of Pinterest are looking to share and repin creative ideas and advice.

There are thousands of infographics being submitted to Pinterest on a daily basis. However, I can count on my hand how many infographics I’ve ever seen make it to the popular page of Pinterest. When it comes to going viral, making the popular page is an absolute necessity in the effectiveness of your content. While infographics might work on every other social network, they just aren’t what the Pinterest users are looking to share. The whole point of infographics is to visually interpret data in a way that’s appealing to the users. While information and knowledge is extremely convenient, it just doesn’t fit in well with the ideals of Pinterest. Every few years there is a change in the trends associated with the design of content for social sites. While infographics have been a hot item for years, they just aren't working at the level I've seen with other content on Pinterest.

That’s why the team at 97th Floor and I are proud to share with you what we believe is the first of a new type of visual content: Instructographics.

Instructographics for Pinterest:

Since the term of “instructographics” has never been used before, I guess I should provide a formal definition. Instructographics are a vertical representation of creative ideas or steps that guides the user to a specific deliverable. It doesn’t matter if it’s a recipe, hairstyle, do-it-yourself project . . . instructographics work on nearly any level. Why do these graphics work better than infographics on Pinterest? It’s simply because the instructographic walks the user through a series of instructions that will result in something useful in real life.

Pinterest is all about the sharing of ideas and the instructographic is the perfect type of content for doing such.

So how does one go about constructing an instructographic? At 97th Floor we use the following methods when setting up one of our many Pinterest marketing campaigns:

Step 1: Find an Idea

For this step it’s pretty simple, just find an idea of a cool concept or creation that you think would go over well in the Pinterest community. The possibilities are endless; however, make sure the idea is something that you’ve never seen before.

Do you have an idea that is just so brilliant that it’s never been seen before? Good, that’s what you’ll need. After you’ve determined exactly what you want to share with the community, get your team together and start brainstorming the processes you’ll need to take to get to a final product. While you could probably make a monster instructographic outlining every single detail, I believe in K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Step 2: Begin the Design

After you’ve determined exactly what content your instructographic will contain, begin designing a basic step by step vertical guide. It is important to remember to keep the title of your instructographic as visible as possible as it will be the first thing viewed by the users of Pinterest.

Step 3: Upload to your Client Site

Unlike other social networks that give major notice to the URL that the image is uploaded on, Pinterest gives very little attention to this element. As long as the content is remotely similar to the site and looks like it fits it will be just find with Pinterest.

Step 4: Size it Correctly

What’s the difference between 40 visitors to your site from an instructographic and 40,000? The size of your content. As long as your content is longer than 2,500 pixels it will be unreadable by the Pinterest users. Anything smaller and Pinterest will magnify the image so that it's readable on the site (meaning there's no reason to click through to your page). This forces them to click on your submission, through to your page to view the content. If it’s something that’s worth reading and creative, this is a necessity. If it’s longer than 5,000 pixels, then create a simple 300x300 pixel button outlining your graphic. The reason for this is because the “like” and “repin” buttons are at the top of the submission. If they have to scroll too far town to view the entire piece, chances are they aren’t going to scroll up to click on those buttons. For me the ideal image is 600x3000 pixels.

Step 5: Submit and Pin!

When your instructographic is ready to be shared, there are several important elements that you should keep in mind before submitting to Pinterest.

If you're still having troubles understanding the intricacies of the instructographic below is one 97th Floor recently designed for a client which received 14,000+ repins:

The Pinterest Popularity Algorithm

Like every other social network in the realm of the internets, there is a science behind going popular on Pinterest. This is no way considered gaming the Pinterest site, however, it will give your content the best chance possible to make it to the popular board.

Once every piece of content is submitted it is placed onto the top of the specific category pages. Getting to the top of these pages is essential to going viral on Pinterest. Consider these category pages your springboard to the popular page. You do not need an established or aged account to get to the top, however, there are some elements that will block your attempts. Every piece of content is placed onto the top of the category pages barring it doesn’t break any of the following guidelines:

• You’ve submitted within the past hour
  • It seems that in an effort to combat spam, Pinterest has limited every user account to ONE piece of content on the category pages per hour. We tell all our clients to hold off on the pinning up to three hours before we’re ready for a content push.

• You’ve hosted your content on Imgur
  • I have no idea why Pinterest has done so, but any piece of content hosted on Imgur will not make it to the top of the category pages. I’m guessing this is a maneuver to differentiate themselves from Reddit, however, no one has explained the reasoning quite yet. Just beware if you plan on rehosting content on your site.

Timing the Submission

As with every social network, there is a specific time that you can submit that will give you the best chance of reaching the front or popular pages. Pinterest is no different as their users tend to be more active during different points of the day. The goal as a content creator is to get your content onto the site when it is least competitive yet most effective. With Pinterest this time tends to be between 5-7AM and 5-7PM EST. The reason for this is because the majority of users are either waking up or getting off work to check their Pinterest boards. Since this is the case, you want to submit your content at least one hour beforehand to ensure that it will be visible to the most people at the right time.

Monitoring Your Content

After your content has been submitted to Pinterest and gone viral, it is important that you check the popular boards routinely to see if your content has been rehosted on any different sites or blogs. As the creators of the content you are entitled to every visitor that it receives. Unfortunately sites such as 9Gag have included the “Pin It” button allowing the users to direct 100% of the traffic to their site. I have found that if you ask the user that pinned your content from a site like this to nicely to change the URL, they will abide. While it might seem tedious and time consuming, this is essentially thousands of visitors that your client will be missing out on if you do not follow through.

Conclusion

Pinterest is here to stay and if it’s not in your marketing plans yet, it very well should be. I expect Pinterest to double in size and traffic potential in the coming months. It’s important to remember that while the majority of Pinterest users are women, more men are starting to migrate over due to its easy usability and creative content. Don’t be one of those companies kicking themselves in a few months because you didn’t get in on the trend. They said Facebook would never take over Myspace and Twitter would be useless to social marketing. Experts are saying the same thing about Pinterest right now. I’m here to tell you they’re wrong.

About Colby Almond — I'm Colby Almond and I'm a marketer with 97th Floor and I've been in the game for nearly 7 years. I live, breath, and sweat social media and creative content. I'm also the most devoted UNC fan you'll ever meet. Visit www.colbyalmond.com for more awesome information.

SEO MOZ Article Link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/going-viral-on-pinterest-driving-big-traffic-and-making-pinterest-a-real-marketing-solution

Pinterest for Increasing Business Traffic and Increasing the Bottom Line

by Lance King (Pin Guru)

Pinterest?

Did you know Pinterest can be used to generate leads for your business? It’s true, but before unlocking the power of how this hot social networking platform can stimulate your bottom-line, it’s important to understand the overall purpose of Pinterest.

Created by a small team in Palo Alto, California, Pinterest is a viral pinboard that allows a community of users to paste their favorite pictures from almost anywhere on the web onto an online interest board, called “Pinboards.”According to business intelligence firm RJ Metrics, 17.2% of all pinboards are categorized under Home, followed by Arts and Crafts (12.4%), Style/Fashion (11.7%), Food (10.5%) and Inspiration/Education (9.0%). Of those, food is the fastest-growing category. Pinterest is the fastest growing social networking platform to reach 10 million monthly unique visitors. People everywhere are congregating to this site because it is developed around specific interests, lifestyles, and societal concerns.

Howto Turn Traffic into Cash

Pinterest has the attention of millions of businesses. This may be because, according to a recent referral traffic report published by Shareaholic,  Pinterest drove more traffic than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube…combined. Additionally, Pinterest was just .01% behind Twitter for the 4th Spot and .02% behind Google, who currently sits in 3rd place.

While this information may be appealing, the process of generating quality referrals through Pinterest is even more attractive due to its simplicity. Upon joining Pinterest, adding a “Pin it” button to your bookmarks bar will allow you to pin any picture from a blog to a Pinboard on Pinterest. This pin will then be posted on your profile for others to view, like, comment, and even re-pin to a board of their interest.  

7Stepsto Increased Referral Traffic

Step 1: Building Pinboards

First, while using Pinterest to advertise business offers, remember that you are entering a community of people who primarily use this networking platform to organize and share pictures they value. Keep in mind you will be branding your business name. Build boards around business offers as well as other popular boards. Trending boards will be discovered, most effectively, through a site called Pinreach Analytics (mentioned later). Pins should be high quality and should only give the viewer a taste the rest of the offer.

Step 2: Creating a profile page

Because there are currently no advertisements on Pinterest, you will need to brand your company name without branding your company name. When creating a profile page, rather that adding a company logo, add an image of a person who will best represent the firm. Your profile page should parallel other users within the social community.

Step 3: Creating content

Remember that Pinterest is a community of men and women who are passionate about building a profile of valuable images that will benefit both themselves and others following. Therefore it is important to post quality pictures that will more than draw others to a business offer, but will help them see that you are a person with similar interests. This profile picture is a great example of how generating followers on Pinterest will follow as genuine value is displayed in your pictures.

Step 4: Getting Pins to Go Viral

Much like other social network websites, timing of submitting a post will determine the size of the audience on the various category pages. As depicted below, in order to be most effective with your pins, without the competition, it will be most advantageous to pin between 5-7AM and 5-7PM EST. These times are best to pin because most users are waking up or leaving work. Therefore, in order to get a pin to go viral, it is important to pin just before the acme of the traffic peak. As this pin is repined by other users, it will be broadcasted to other users profile pages, and have the potential of then being repined by their followers. The results of having a pin become viral are indicated below in the number of visits received from one pin.

Step 5: Leveraging your Pins

According to a Social Media guru, Colby Almond, “with the site’s growth in unique users and ability to “repin” and share, viral content will continue to bring in thousands of daily visitors [to a website] for up to 3-4 weeks.” In addition to when to time your pins, the graph above also depicts the dramatic effect a pin had in one day for Almonds website. Now imagine the leverage of having multiple Pinterest accounts pinning for the same Pinboard. This becomes possible when shared with other users of Pinterest. Once a person has accepted an invitation to pin on a “community board”, they will have the ability to pin to that Pinboard using their Pinterest profile. This Pinboard is added to their profile page and considered their own. As this board gains targeted followers, it will significantly increase a segmented audience to a blog or website.

Step 6: Gaining a Following

The fastest way to gain a following will be syncing your Facebook Friends, Gmail contacts, etc. This is easily done by clicking the Find Friends tab as indicated. Followers will continue to be added most effectively to your profile as you consistently add value through your pins; and by following other users Pinboards and/or profiles, and then commenting, liking, and re-pinning their pins onto your Pinboards.

Step 7: Pinreach Analytics

Pinreach Analytics is a community of Pinterest users who are interested in both tracking their analytics as well as that of other like-minded individuals on Pinterest. Upon singing up with Pinreach, you will be awarded a Pinterest score based on how influencial you have been to date toward the Pinterest social network. The score is based on metrics such as number of pins, repins, likes, followers, etc. received with your Pinterest profile. 

Additionally, you will have access to information about specific details about pins, boards, influential followers, etc. that have helped you become successful.

Analytics should be checked on a regular basis in order to identify trends within your profile and trends of others. Lastly, each time you login to Pinreach, your profile avatar will be posted on their homepage, for other users to view; and eventually you may be identified as a Trending Member. Trending members are most likely to have interaction within the Pinreach community. This networking website will significantly benefit your Pinterest profile and ultimately increase traffic to your business.

Pinterest Usage Statistics 2012 [Infographic]

by Ansel Alexander

Pinterest has shocked the social media world by growing to one of the most popular social sharing platforms in a very short period of time.

In order to understand how Pinterest has been able to attract so much attention, it helps to take a look at the usage statistics of Pinterest and identify who Pinterest’s users are, what they’re using the service for and how often they’re using Pinterest.

Recently, an infographic (posted below) was recently published by The Huffington Post that provides us with a slew of user statistics regarding Pinterest.

Pinterst Usage Statistics Infographic Highlights:

1. Pinterest users spend an average of almost 16 minutes on the site per visit (12.1 for Facebook).
2. 50% of Pinterest users have children.
3. Almost 70% of Pinterest users are female.
4. 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women.
5. As of January 2012, Pinterest had received just under 12 million unique visits.
6. Pinterest receives almost 1.5 million visitors each day.
7. Pinterest provides more referral traffic to other sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.

Click Infographic to Enlarge

Pinterest for Scrapbooking

mashable.com

By Lain Ehmann

Can you picture an online bulletin board where you consolidate images from around the web in a single spot? Now imagine you get an unlimited number of boards that you can name and organize however you like. And what if you could share those boards with other people, check what your friends pin to their boards, and comment and share images you like? Wouldn't that be awesome?

Well, that's Pinterest!

Not only can you pin things you find, you can also RE-pin things other people find. It opens up a whole world of connecting and getting inspired via images. Very cool for visual-types like us scrapbookers, eh?

Here are some of my favorite ways to use Pinterst for scrapbooking:

1. A single place to hold all my online inspiration. Instead of having to jump from blog to blog to website to gallery to Flickr and back again, I can hold all my online images in one spot. Every card, every layout, every mini-album can be in one convenient spot. And yes, I can tag them so they're searchable, or create separate boards for each sub-category. Hurray!

2. A great way to track color inspiration. I love finding unique and unusual color combos, from paint swatches to fabrics. I pin these all to a single board I call "Color Inspiration." When I'm feeling dry or tired of the same old colors, I can take a quick glance through my pinned inspiration and find something to jumpstart my creative juices.

3. An interactive wish list. How often do you cruise about the web and encounter something you'd like to purchase at a future time (or like your spouse to purchase for you?). Not EVERYTHING in the world is at Amazon. Now you can create a visual wish list you can share with friends and family, or use to treat yourself when your tax return comes. Eat your heart out, Oprah's Favorite Things!

4. A list of "To Do" items. I've got more tutorials and craft ideas than I could ever complete, even if I were to retire tomorrow. Saving them as browser bookmarks or printing them out and filing them isn't very efficient, but saving them on a Pinterest board is PERFECT. When I have some time, I can peruse my board and pick out a tutorial to try. I can even upload my version of the craft to the same board, or delete the pin entirely after I complete it.

5. A way to track trends. On Pinterest, you can get a running feed of everything that everyone in the whole Pinterest world is pinning. When you do this, you can easily spy trends, commonalities, and inspiration as it jumps from one medium (say, graphic design) to another (like fabric or clothing). I use Pinterest to keep ahead of scrapbooking trends.

If you'd like a 15-page FREE report on how to use Pinterest for Scrapbookers, visit my blog. While you're there, sign up my newsletter athttp://www.getscraphappy.com. Through scrapbooking videos, tutorials, projects and inspiration, I help women make their scrapbooking simple, fast and fun!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lain_Ehmann

Pin Your Articles to Increase Your Exposure

Pin Your Articles to Increase Your Exposure

Penny, Managing Editor

Educate, Motivate, and Inspire with Your Articles on Pinterest

Commonly described as one of the most addicting social networking platforms, Pinterest is a web-based “pinboard” that’s a convenient way to pin anything you find interesting or motivating to share with the world.

You can use Pinterest to your advantage by pinning your articles to increase your exposure. Pinning your EzineArticles.com published articles helps you build a bridge of trust:

From Pinterest (point of entry) to EzineArticles.com (bridge of trust) to your blog or website (safe-landing).

As a Pinterest user, you can upload and link to anything you want to share with others, repin everything that sparks you interest, comment on or like other users’s pins, and easily organize your pins onto Boards.

The pins or images link to the original source, which in turn increases the source’s exposure. Should another user become interested in a pin, they will click-through to the source’s website for more information. If they like what they see, they will repin it.

Not on Pinterest? If you know someone who is already on Pinterest, ask them to send you an invitation. Otherwise, you can request a Pinterest invite (for more information about joining Pinterest click here).

If you already have a Pinterest account, here’s how you can pin your articles:

First of all, you need an image that’s highly relevant to your article, as well as original and sharable. To do this, you can:

• Create the image yourself. This is the easiest method, although it might not be the most polished. There are several apps you can download to give even the most amateur photo that little something extra to attract Pinterest users and increase your chances of getting your pins repinned.
   
• Invest in (or make friends with) a graphic designer. If you don’t have a friend with whom you could barter services, scope out freelancing websites to request an original, polished image.
   
• Purchase stock images. If you are looking for polished work for your pins, but don’t want to put in the effort to develop and cultivate the images yourself, try websites, like iStock Photo or Shutterstock, which provide pay as you go images and/or subscriptions to purchase images.

Once you have an original image that corresponds with your article, follow these steps from yourPinterest account:

1. Select “Add +” and then select “Upload a Pin”
2. Select “Browse” and then open an image from your computer
3. Select a relevant Board to categorize your pin*
4. “Describe your pin” by providing a hook and the title of the article in 500 characters or less
5. Select “Pin It” and then select “Edit”
6. In the “Link” field, paste the URL to your published article, select “Save Pin,” and you’re done!

*Tip: Don’t use Board names relevant only to you, e.g. “My Articles.” Use keywords relevant to your niche to increase your pins ability to be searched. For example, let’s say dog grooming is your niche. Relevant keywords to create Boards may include “Dog Breeds,” “DIY Dog Grooming,” etc.

Pinterest users pin and repin items to be inspired, to be motivated, to connect with others, and to discover new things. Bear this in mind and use the above strategy to increase your exposure and credibility today.