How Pinnable are Your Website’s Images?
If you are marketing products online then it is very likely that you are using images on your website that show them off to your prospective customers. In the past, because of the low resolution of Internet images and other restrictions on graphics, many websites have used simple, small, plain images in their online catalogues. The rise of digital photography has made it easy to take your own photographs for your website as a way to reduce the costs of online marketing. Social media has changed the nature of images on the Internet, and because social networks are geared for raising brand awareness, it has become important to produce shareable content to take advantage of this promotional medium. On no other social network is this more important than Pinterest, where users actively collect images that they like.
Pinterest is still in its early days, and in fact, is still in beta-testing, so is invitation-only, but even at this stage it has shown a bit of potential as a marketing vehicle. Membership of the site jumped quickly to around 11 million1, and even though growth has leveled off in recent months, users are still more engaged with Pinterest than Google+ or Linkedin2. More interesting to businesspeople is that Pinterest is driving around two-and-a-half times the number of online referrals as Google+, Linkedin and YouTube combined3. Users are overwhelmingly more likely to re-pin an image that they see on another user’s board, while using the “pin it” button accounts for around one fifth of all pins on the site3.
This provides a fantastic opportunity for marketing products through the images that a business posts since they have a good chance of being shared generously around the site. This makes using Pinterest-friendly images an important consideration in your web design and Internet marketing plans. Because Pinterest squeezes or stretches images to fit them into its one-size-fits-all format, it is best to try and use pictures that are as close to that format as possible. While there are no limits as to how big an image is, if it is wider than 554 pixels then it will be resized to fit onto the site, which may distort it. At the other end of the scale images need to be larger than the minimum 81 pixels wide and tall in order to be displayed but again, they will be resized and this may result in the images displaying poorly4. Taking the time to optimize your images for display on Pinterest boards can be an effective way of attracting visitors to your corporate website.
Dynamic images that are alluring, which display well and express the style of your brand are the ones that are most likely to be shared on Pinterest. It is worth taking a look at the kinds of images that your customers are collecting as well as what your competitors are pinning to their boards in order to see where tastes and trends in graphic promotions are heading. The style of Internet images has changed a lot in recent years, and web pages have become much more sophisticated and use images much more creatively now. Pinterest is one site that is taking advantage of the boom in quality graphic content on the Internet now, and at this early stage of the development of this particular online trend, it is a great time to integrate Pinterest into a larger online marketing strategy. A good place to start is by publishing images of your products that people will want to collect and re-pin. Contact Infintech Designs to discuss what sorts of images you should be using to take full advantage of the growth of Pinterest.
2. http://marketingland.com/google-users-spend-3-minutes-per-month-there-6960
3. http://mashable.com/2012/02/25/pinterest-user-demographics/
4. http://llsocial.com/2012/05/pinterest-guide-to-images-infograph/
