Enabling Pinterest on Your Website

Pinterest has been getting my attention lately. Pinterest allows you to graphically bookmark or "pin" photos and videos on a website and organize them into folders called "boards". The social networking aspect comes where you follow other's boards and "repin" content to your own boards. Users can also surf a content stream of different predetermined categories such as diy crafts and food and drink. The most popular Pinterest account belongs to Power of Pinterest Book with 28,000 followers. That's a pretty paltry in comparison to the most popular twitter or facebook

After launching in 2010, Pinterest has managed to capture and hold onto a strongly female demographic. According to Mashable, 68% of Pinterest users are female with 27.4% of the all users in the coveted 24-34 age range. If you are a business that sells products for women then you should absolutely implement Pinterest in a big way on your website - your competition is.

The biggest reason that a business should actively engage in Pinterest is inbound links. Every time someone pins or repins your content from one of their friends an inbound link is created. Search engine ranking gives a lot to weight to inbound links.

Pinterest integration can be incredibly easy to implement but must rely on two separate and distinct methods of generating Pinterest interest. The first method relies on the business creating their own pins. A "look at me" kind of approach. You simply pin images from your site to your boards and then hope and pray that people will follow you. To add this to your website you just add a button.
Here's a group of buttons that can be embedded on a website. These allow the user to follow specific accounts not unlike a "follow me on facebook" button. These, in fact, are buttons to my account.

The  second method is dependent upon visitors to your website to pin content for themselves. This "look at them" is a far better means of communicating your message. You can also add a button to a web page or a blog post to enable a user to create a pin and add it to one of their boards. Pinterest has a really effective code generator on their site to make it easy to add this functionality simply.  Here's a button that pins content on this blog post to your Pinterest account.

Users can also take "pinning" into their own hands by adding "Pin It" functionality to their browsers. This is the option that most appeals to me because currently the vast majority of things I want to pin are not Pinterest enabled on websites.

Over the course of a few months of pinning I have noticed a few problems that make pinning difficult. When trying to pin an image I get the error messages stating that there is no usable image on the pin. The fixes are not easy. They require thoughtful web design which is an art itself. Here's a list of best practices I came up with for making your website Pinterest friendly.

1. You must have an image or a video. Pinterest cannot graphically pin something that is not graphical. Pinterest will recognize media from upload sites such as YouTube and flickr so don't be afraid to embed content from the cloud.
2. Don't use incompatible image types. Pinterest can't pull an image from a Flash image gallery. Manually test pin all of you images to see if they work.
3. Don't use too many images on a single page. Make it simple to pin. Don't have 25+ images come up when someone wants to pin a page. Pinterest pulls every image on the page including headers and footers. One good one is the best. Having an individual item on a page as opposed to a table full of items makes it easier too. Not only does limiting the number of images on your web page help with pinning, it is good web design in general.
4. Avoid filler jpegs. That white jpeg you are using as a space saver because you don't know CSS will show up too.
5. Don't use images that are too big or too small. Some images don't  frame the subject well especially if you are using your jpeg to eat up white space in your design.
6. Go square or vertical with your images. I noticed this particularly on the mobile app. Long, thin, horizontal images look squashed and unflattering on Pinterest.
7. Always use alternate text for each image. Pinterest pulls the alt text of your image as the description. Otherwise the user will have to fill in the details of your product and might get it wrong. Include the product name, your company name and the price. This will also help with repins of your products as all the pertinent details show up on mobile devices.

Pinterest is definitely growing in popularity. It is becoming a visual facebook. The next big sector of growth for Pinterest will be with men. Find a reason for men to Pinterest and you'll make a lot of money.