In the first of my three articles in this Pinterest series, I talked about five ways to drive more traffic to your website with Pinterest. In order to have a large reach on Pinterest, you want to make sure your pins are getting repinned as often and frequently as possible. Here are five tips to help you supercharge your repinning strategy.
Join a Pinterest Group Board that Targets Your Audience
Joining the right group board on Pinterest can do wonders in getting more repins. This is because group boards have tremendous audience reach. I’ll explain how this works.
Let’s say that I’m a member of the Food Bloggers of Canada Group Board, which at the time of the writing has 900 followers. Every time someone pins on that board he has the potential reach of 900 followers, but those numbers are very deceiving.
Now this board has 150 contributing members. If each of those members has 100 full followers (someone who follows all those boards), every time you post onto that group board you not only reach the 900 followers of that specific group board, but you also reach the followers of the 150 members as well. The potential reach of your pin, simply by pinning one pin to one group board is about 15,000 people. Trying doing that with Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin!
By exposing yourself to a larger audience, you have a higher chance of having the right people discover your content and repin it onto their own boards.
Now the next question is how do you find these group boards? One resource to find group boards is by visiting or following PinGroup Boards, that’s all about Pinterest group boards, ranging from furry animals to cutthroat knives.
I’ve also found most group boards are discovered by accident. Since many of them have such high reach, it’s a matter of searching for the right terms and exploring Pinterest before you find the right one.
Some groups will have an open invitation where the founder of the group board will have a way for you to contact them directly, while others may require that you know a member of the group and ask them to extend an invitation to you. When in doubt, consider starting your own Pinterest group board.
Using the Right Ratio for Your Pins
It has long been a blogging tradition that having wider than longer photos was better, that was until Pinterest came along and changed the way that publishers shared photos. Now many online publishers are moving toward portrait style photos, where longer is better than wider.
Photos that are wider than longer don’t stand out on Pinterest. They get lost in the newsfeed of other longer pins. Longer pins occupy more visual real estate in a Pinterest feed.
According to Curalate, a Pinterest analytics company, having images that are too tall may not help in getting repins. They found that pins that had a ratio between 2:3 and 4:5 (pixel width:pixel length) received 60% more repins than those that are really tall compared to width.
My suggestion is to take more portrait photos of your product, food, or recipe to increase the chances of your pins being repined.
Use the Right Colours and Background
To help increase the number of repins for your beautiful photos, here are few tips regarding colour and background to help increase the chances of your pins getting repined.
a) Have a wonderful background to accompany your photos. If you have a lot of white space in the back of your photos and you’re just highlighting one product or food, then this isn’t suggested. Images that consist of less than 10% background receive 2-4 times more repins than pins that have greater than 40% of background. Don’t use white space as your background.
b) Multiple dominant colours can be a great way to grab the attention of a Pinterest user and to encourage her to repin your pin. Having pins that have multiple dominant colours gets them repined about 3.25 times more than pins that have only one single dominant colour.
c) In terms of colour themes, having reddish-orange colour photos get twice as many pins as those that use bluish colour themes.
Create an Instructographic or Instructovideo
Want your pin to get repinned and go viral. One of the best ways is by creating pins that aren’t just stunningly beautiful to look at but to create something so useful that people will want to share with others.
If you’ve used Pinterest a lot, you’ve probably seen infographics on there. Pingage (now Ahalogy) created an infographic about Kale that actually went viral. Within 24 hours it had been shared over 400 times.
Along the same lines of creating an infograph is to also create an instructograph. If you run a recipe blog, consider creating a pin using a free image editing tool like Pixlr, to create an instructorgraph.
An instructograph could show the 4 major steps of what cooking a pasta dish. As much as people love a finished product, they also love seeing a step by step process.
Want to do something extra cool, consider using Vine or Instagram video to create instructovideos and then pinning it on Pinterest through screen capture. Here’s a great example done by Lowe’s that was shared on their Pinterest account and repined 830 times.
Create Rich Pins for Your Recipes, Products, or Blog
And lastly, a great way to get more repins is to give Pinterest users the confidence that your pins come directly from your website through rich pins. Rich pins are pieces of additional information added to the pin that can only be changed by owner or webmaster of a site.
Rich pins are currently limited to products, recipes, movies and online articles and visible on desktop versions of Pinterest. For example, rich pins for recipes will tell others what type of ingredients are needed. Or if you use rich pins for publishing, it will show off the title of the blog post in bold.
If you’re a programmer looking to add rich pins to your website, you can visit Pinterst’s developer’s site that explains how to implement rich pins.
If you’re like most bloggers, and you happen to use WordPress, there are two plugsin that may be of help to your business to create rich pins.
The first one is ABG rich pins, which is specifically for movies, recipes and products. I haven’t tested out this plugin myself, so I’m not too sure of its effectiveness.
The other plugin that you can use, and this is specifically for rich pins for online publishing, is the popular YOAST SEO plugin.
The next step is to head off to rich pin validator website to make sure everything is in order, and if everything gets approved the pins you create from your website will be rich pins.
Those are five helpful hints to help your pins get more repins and increase your presence across Pinterest.
You can unsubscribe any time!
One extra tip for rich pins – if you’re a recipe blogger (as many of us are), you’ll get more mileage if you’re using a recipe markup plugin like Easy Recipe or Ziplist.
These plugins automatically mark up key elements of your recipe, which Pinterest will then automatically retrieve whenever that post is pinned, including the recipe name and the recipe ingredients.
Of course, you don’t have to have a recipe plugin to enable rich pins, but because Pinterest won’t be able to identify the key recipe elements, you’ll see the default post info instead (which as far as I can tell is the title of the post and a brief snippet of the first paragraph).
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