As a social media dweeb, I see lot of Pinterest Marketing Fails, but the one that hurts my heart is when bloggers deliberately make their posts "unpinnable" by having tiny little pictures.
There are many hard core bloggers out there who are rocking the SEO world. They are writing long, thoughtful posts and doing a bunch of outreach to get their work shared so they can get a backlink on Google, but one place they are stepping on their tails is by making tiny little pictures that NO ONE will share on Pinterest.
I GET IT, Pinterest is for chicks and these are serious bloggers who aren't interested in getting traffic from Pinterest... or are they? I reached out to Dave at NinjaOutreach.com and asked if I could tear apart his blog post and he said YES... so maybe he wouldn't mind getting some Pinterest traffic after all!
Bloggers who HATE Pinterest read this first!
I have shared this article with some bloggers and they have nicely told me that they tried Pinterest and HATED it. Tim at ahrefs especially was adamant that Pinterest was a waste of time (they wrote a whole post about hating Pinterest).
And I am thinking they are right, they shouldn't do Pinterest! It takes time and isn't necessarily a "dude thing".
My point is that they should make a tall pin with a good meta description for those of us who DO love Pinterest.
When you write a blog post, have your graphic designer include a tall pin and make sure you have a good description and then forget about it.
Pinners like me will send you free traffic and you won't have to do anything else!
Pinterest Marketing Fails Case Study... Dave at Ninja Outreach
So today I got an email from a guy who I kinda sorta follow (actually I was checking out my "promotions" tab and saw that he had sent an email about blogging). Now, I am a blogging nut and that caught my eye enough to think, hmmm wonder what this is all about.
So I headed over to the link and thought... neato, this is a really good post that I would like to share on my Pinterest Professional Blogging Pinterest Board board.
While the post was a bit plain jane, I clicked the Pinterest button and prayed... be a good picture, be a good picture....
Doh... that is one tiny little picture in Pinterest marketing terms. Yeah I get that it is exactly the right size for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but that itty bitty picture isn't going to do anything on my Pinterest board.
Oh what the heck, let's go ahead and see what it looks like...
Since this is a relatively new board, I don't have lots of data to work with in regard to pins and repins so I did a general Pinterest search on blogging so I could find some popular pins to compare with Dave's pin. Here is an apples to apples look at how Dave's pin stacks up against some of the popular pins about blogging on Pinterest.
So what did Dave do wrong compared to these popular pins?
1. The wrong pin size. The "perfect" size for a Pinterest pin is 736 wide by 1128 tall. Dave's pin was 768 wide and 384 tall. Now, these are not actual sizes but they are the actual proportions of the two pins. As you can see, Dave's pin is much shorter visually than the perfect pin.
2. Not enough "alt" text. Dave did what many of us do and used his post title as his alt tag and that is usually fine for sites like Twitter. But on Pinterest, size does matter so adding the first paragraph or at least a a little more text to his alt tags would have made it more sharable!
Instead of just:
18 Months of Blogging - 3 Growth Strategies I Naively Ignored
Dave could have:
18 Months of Blogging - 3 Growth Strategies I Naively Ignored... If you are a new blogger or have a few years of experience under your belt in blogging, you will be able to relate to (or at least appreciate) the negligence that I naively committed in my early blogging career. I am going to explain in this article the 3 precise growth strategies, that I didn't pay enough attention to.
Pinterest Marketing Success
I took the liberty of re-doing Dave's pin into something that would be more appropriate for pinning. And NO I didn't think it had to be girlied up or changed measurably, it just needed a bit more heft to make it pinnable! Check out the new pin here.
Pinterest Marketing Fails Wrapup
Okay, first off, thanks to Dave for letting me use him in my case study! That was actually pretty fun and reminded me that I have a bunch of old posts that I really need to swing around and do some work on.
If you think that your blog post would be a good fit for Pinterest, you might want to make sure that you have an image in there that would be appropriate if someone decides to hit that beautiful P button up there at the top!
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