It's also relatively well known that the posts receiving the best engagement statistics are those which incorporate imagery. The simple adage that a picture is worth a thousand words holds true even in social media. They are also more visible amongst the seemingly endless posts taking up space on our walls, profiles, etc., leaving a larger visual impression than a few lines of text.
In my opinion, Pinterest is at the top of the pile when it comes to a platform that allows you to visually catalog things that you like. You can take things that you see from anywhere around the web and pin it to one of your boards. There it will stay as inspiration, as something you want to accomplish, as a reminder, or as simply something you like to look at.Digital Marketing Ramblings reported in their 50 Amazing Pinterest Stats (January 2014) that Pinterest, as of 7/10/13, had 70 million users and, as of 5/9/13, had 2.5 billion pageviews per month. That's obviously a very large and active audience. Sure, Pinterest's active demographic isn't appealing for all content producers, but there's no denying their visual impressions are worth more than the code used to render them.
Don't Be Invisible
What happens if a Pinterest user finds an amazing website they wish to share with the rest of the world and there are no static images on the page? Pinterest gives a very sad error message:
Fix It
This is very simple and I'll break it down into a few short steps:- Get an image
- Place it on your page
Where Do I Get an Image?
This is also simple. Take a photo. For those of you thinking what you do doesn't have anything you can take a photo of, try to think of some visual typically associated with it. For instance, software developers sharing their open source work could use a screen capture, or logo associated with the library they are extending.If you think about it long enough there's going to be something visual you can incorporate. If you're really stuck, do a Google Image search to see examples of imagery related to a topic.
Pay Off is in Spades
OK, so you've pinned to Pinterest and you want to post to Facebook and send out a tweet too? Great! You already have the image to use on your page!As I said, social media platforms have given special treatment to posts that include images. The reason the brands you follow are so noticeable is not an accident. They already know this lesson and do it without thinking.
For example, a brand post to Facebook that is meant to link to a webpage is actually posted as an image taking up the entire 403 pixel width and height allotted to images in the news feed. The link to the content is then provided in the description. A direct link to that same content would yield a much smaller footprint and would be passed over more easily by your audience.
Similarly for Twitter, be sure to embed the image in the tweet so that it displays in the feed and not as a link that needs to be clicked on.
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