If you’ve been in the dark ages for the last few months, or you simply aren’t up to scratch on social media then you may or may not have heard of Pinterest. Since it’s launch in March 2010 Pinterest has gradually increased in popularity and It was around the end of 2011 that Pinterest exploded from a casual pinboard community into an absolute powerhouse of over 10 million users.
Source: Experian Hitwise
What Is Pinterest?
Pinterest is an online image gallery, they take image curation to a whole new level. Allowing people to create their own personal image boards which can then be shared with others. People can “like” or “repin” your images onto their own boards which will be displayed on the homepage of their followers. Because of the nature of Pinterest it has huge potential to go viral just like any other social media site.
Pinterest has a little bit of something for everyone, but right now the site is mainly dominated by females and populated with images featuring home décor, crafts, fashion, and food. This means that your Fashion or Beauty niches have a much larger potential to go viral on Pinterest where as your male orientated niches wont be so popular yet. However it is only a matter of time before the gender demographic balances out.
Going Viral On Pinterest
If you are not using Pinterest as part of your marketing strategy then you definitely should have a rethink. Colby Almond wrote a great post on SEOMoz about how to go viral on Pinterest. If you haven’t already read it then i recommend you do so.
Pinterest is driving more traffic than places like Google+ and LinkedIn and these are obviously figures that you can’t ignore. If you aren’t taking advantage of it then you are leaving “money on the table”? Google is looking at social interaction with your website. A simple boost of viral traffic to your website can do wonders for your overall site authority and help you increase rankings. All of these repins, likes, tweets and shares. They are all backlinks or “votes of popularity” for your website, Google takes all these things into account and you should be aiming to give them the social signals they are looking for.
So How Do I Go Viral?
It’s not as hard as you might think. But obviously there is a trick to it. Generally things that go viral are your typical Memes. You can use memes to build backlinks to your site and at the same time bring in a surge of traffic.
Here is a recent example of a meme that went viral
See the full image here
The meme that you can see above is just the first picture of many. It is a series of cute kitty images, that goes down well in the female crowd, they are all linked together creating a very long image that Pinterest shrinks. If they just view your image the chances are they wont click through to your website because they have already seen the image, so we create an image that makes them want to click through.
This is the trick to getting a very high click through to your website. Check the image below.
To increase your click through on Pinterest you need a image like this. To create one it has to be over 2500 pixels in length since Pinterest will magnify your image if it is any smaller. The best size for a viral meme on Pinterest is around 600 px wide and 3000 px in length. Creating memes using this size and style will increase your potential to go viral and maximize the number of visitors you get to your website.
