How to Improve Your Pinterest Visibility and Engagement

Looking for simple ways to strengthen your Pinterest presence?

Wondering how to enhance your Pinterest content?

A few easy-to-implement changes can greatly increase the visibility, engagement, and sales generated by your pins.

In this article, you'll discover three ways to improve your Pinterest boards and pins.

How to Improve Your Pinterest Visibility and Engagement by Mitt Ray on Social Media Examiner.

On a web page, have you ever noticed text appearing in place of an image? This text appears when your cursor hovers over the image, too. The technical name is image alternative text (or alt text). Many website images don't include alt text or don't optimize this text, even though doing so can benefit your social marketing on Pinterest.

Optimize your images for Pinterest by adding image alternative text.

When someone pins an image from your website, the alt text becomes the pin description. By adding alt text to images, you ensure the image automatically has a good description that will help drive engagement and clicks.

For example, when you pin this image that appears on a blog post, the text you see in the pin description is the same as the image alt text.

Your image alternative text will become the pin description.

Alt text can also help your image rank well in Pinterest search results. On Pinterest, people do 2 billion searches every month. The pins that appear in the top results will reap the benefits through repins and clicks. Pins that do well in search results have two things in common: keywords and repins.

Say you do a Pinterest search for bedroom design. In the search results, the top images have received lots of pins and the pin descriptions include the keywords "bedroom design," "bedroom," or "design." Some results also have keywords in places like the comments, the rich pin headline, and so on.

The top appearing pins on Pinterest have both repins and keywords.

The upshot is that when you add alt text to images, keywords for the pin description improve your images' search performance. So if your image appears on a blog post about bedroom design, add this keyword to the image's alternative text. If someone pins the image and it receives a lot of repins, the image will likely turn up in search results.

Write Image Alt Text

For the feature images for your blog, write alt text that piques curiosity. Your alt text might read like a headline.

You also want to include relevant search keywords and hashtags. Make sure the keywords you pick are relevant to the image and the page they lead to because you don't want to confuse your audience. For help determining what keywords to use, check the search suggestions that appear on a Pinterest search results page.

Pinterest provides search suggestions, too.

As you keep clicking these suggestions, different search results will appear. These suggestions may help you think of other keywords to use as image alt text on your blog posts and web pages. You might use one keyword for some images and another keyword for other images.

Add Alt Text to Website Images

In any website's HTML, an image's alt text appears in the image tag's "alt=" attribute. If you're comfortable writing in an HTML editor, you can modify the alt text on any image by changing the words that appear after the attribute.

You can modify the image alternative text for any web page.

If your blog or website runs on WordPress, you can click the Edit option and type the text into the Alternative Text box.

Here's how you add image alternative text to your image on WordPress.

On Pinterest, people can follow either your whole feed or selected boards. Your Pinterest page likely has one or two boards with more followers than your other boards. By making your most popular board (or boards) the focal point of your Pinterest page, you can increase traffic and engagement.

Clearly, the most followed board is the one most people like, so it's easier to get people to follow it. You can then interest the main board's followers in your other boards, too.

Place your focal Pinterest board in the top boards row.

When you place your most popular board in the top row of your Pinterest page, visitors will see that board first and be more likely to follow you. To make this board stand out in the top row, give it the most attractive cover image. Everyday Health placed its popular Healthy Living board in the first row so it gets a lot of attention. In fact, it's the first board on the page.

Alternately, with Pinterest's Showcase feature, you can highlight pins from a single board at the top of your Pinterest page. When visitors land on your Pinterest page, the showcase is one of the first things they see.

You can also try pinning more images to your top board. More people will see these pins, check out the board, and hopefully follow it. This technique can also help boost repins and traffic to your site. To increase the number of pins, make the board into a group board and invite contributors.

How Pinterest Followers Are Counted

The follower count displayed on your Pinterest page isn't the total number of complete followers. That count is actually the total number of unique followers of all of the boards and entire page combined.

For example, Nordstrom's Pinterest page shows 4.5 million followers, but most of its boards have around 600,000 followers. Our Favorite Things is the only board that comes close to 4.5 million, with 4.3 million followers. In other words, the followers aren't following every board.

The 4.5 million followers on Nordstrom's page aren't complete page followers.

You can see a similar example on Everyday Health's Pinterest page. Only the Healthy Living board has 3.5 million followers, while most of the other boards have around 150,000 followers.

Crowdsourcing is a great way to drive up engagement. You get free content to share and a potential increase in sales.

For example, the luxury brand Coach asked customers on Instagram and Twitter to share a selfie taken while wearing their shoes, using the hashtag #coachfromabove. Everyone who submitted a photo had a chance to be featured in a gallery on the Coach website.

Coach used crowdsourcing to drive engagement and sales.

The campaign resulted in 629 users using the hashtag #coachfromabove on Instagram alone in 8 weeks. Conversions increased by 5% to 7% and the average order value increased by 2%. The campaign worked because it showed that Coach shoes look good on normal people, not just on models and in professionally edited photos.

Many brands other than Coach are taking advantage of user-generated content. For the Burberry Art of the Trench campaign, people share pictures of themselves in trenchcoats. Lululemon fans share content with the #thesweatlife hashtag.

Your business can take advantage of crowdsourcing by combining Instagram and Pinterest. People like sharing pictures of themselves on Instagram, but Pinterest drives more traffic and sales.

With this tactic, you crowdsource images from Instagram and then share them on Pinterest as product pins and buyable pins. However, before you share a user's image, make sure you get permission from the person who owns the photo.

Coach shares fan images on their #COACHFROMABOVE Pinterest board.

A great tool for executing a crowdsourcing campaign is Yotpo. Through your dashboard, you can find images on Instagram. Look for tall, portrait-oriented images because they get the highest engagement.

Pinterest recommends you use images with an aspect ratio of 2:3 with dimensions of 600 x 900 pixels. If you aren't able to find a tall image that's close to these ratios, you can send a photo request directly to your customers with Yotpo.

After you find an image, Yotpo helps you ask for permission to feature it on Pinterest or anywhere else. Then you can share the image on your Pinterest page and make sure it links back to a landing page where users can purchase the product.

Conclusion

If you're looking to increase traffic or drive more sales organically, Pinterest is probably the best social network to focus on. It drives a healthy bit of social media traffic, and does this with only 150 million users, compared to Facebook's 1.8 billion. Using the three tactics above can help you drive more traffic, sales, and engagement on Pinterest.

What do you think? Have you used any of these Pinterest marketing tactics? Which one has led to the best results? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

How to Improve Your Pinterest Visibility and Engagement by Mitt Ray on Social Media Examiner.

View the original article here

Original source: How to Improve Your Pinterest Visibility and Engagement.
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