Social Media Marketing: Pins That Produce Results

Discover the Pinterest images that produce the best results

The most active Pinterest users are doers. In using Pinterest, they are looking for things to add to their shopping lists, their action lists, their wishlists, their bucket lists. But they don’t just make lists or pin things to their Pinterest boards. They act on what they find on Pinterest.

If you want to attract their attention, you must produce pins that are attractive, useful, and actionable. Pretty pictures might get pinned to a wishlist Pinterest board, but they rarely get pinned to an action list Pinterest board. And it’s the action list boards that produce clickthroughs, visits to your web pages, and buying actions.

For instance, the following image which was shared by a student of mine is cute, but I would bet that it got very few repins and even fewer clickthroughs. There’s nothing in the image to inspire action.

People that love cute dogs might repin the image to one of their dog boards, but they will not act on the image. The image has nothing to do with anything they might want to buy for their dogs.

Now, the image was linked to a site where you could sign up for a money-making opportunity webinar for stay-at-home moms. So the image had a vague connection to the actual website, but not enough to attract the real audience for the webinar.

But, if you combine the image with a headline telling people what’s on offer, more people would share the image and more people would click through to sign up for the webinar. That’s the purpose of an actionable Pinterest pinned image!

These headline graphics, however, still do not do as well as a tip-o-graphic. Active Pinterest users have clicked through on too many of these headline graphics only to find a spammy offer, a weakly written article, or nothing at all useful. So active Pinterest users rarely share these headline graphics. Even more rarely, they click through to the website behind the pin.

Active Pinterest users want to know more before they spend their time clicking through to a website. They want to know that the website truly has something to offer. That’s where tip-o-graphics come into play.

Tip-o-graphics give Pinterest users a deeper look into the web page they will find when they click through to the website linked to the pin.

Here’s a short tip-o-graphic that I created to play off the above two graphics. Notice that the same image of the woman, dog, and computer are incorporated into all three images in this article, but only the tip-o-graphic actually offers enough detail to inspire someone to click through to the web page.

Answer “yes” to any of the three questions in the tip-o-graphic, and you could be motivated to click through to find out more. Now, if your website doesn’t deliver on the implicit promise, you might not make the sale. But there is a good chance, in this case, that many of the people who come to the website will sign up for the webinar to find out more. The questions in the above tip-o-graphic have provided enough incentive to sign up.

Why not try more tip-o-graphics? It took me less than three minutes to create the tip-o-graphic above. I guarantee you that the tip-o-graphic above will get more clickthroughs than the plain image or the headline graphic.

Personally, of course, I’d want a better web page URL than the one above going to aweb.page. That URL includes no keywords. If I saw that URL on an image, I would not click through. Again, no incentive. No reason.

So, besides a great tip-o-graphic, you’ve got to create descriptive URLs that deliver on the promise made in the graphic.