by Sudheer

22 ways images go viral on Pinterest based on latest proven research

1. Pinterest is driving more buying traffic to businesses than any other social media platform including Facebook. The power of visuals in action.

2. Regardless of what type of business you are in if you can find a way to be successful on Pinterest it is in your best interest to do so.

The Service Provider Myth

You’re thinking “I’m a service provider and I don’t have pretty images to share. I guess that means I should forget about Pinterest!”

Wait a minute before you decide to pass on Pinterest.

Yes you do need images but they don’t have to be all eye candy. As a matter of fact you don’t want your Pinterest page to be all about your services/products. You really don’t.

Guess what? Did you know that 5 million articles are being pinned on a daily basis? That’s right! So for bloggers and writers if you put image(s) in your posts you can increase your chances of being shared by leveraging Pinterest.

Visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text which is one of the reasons online shoppers are using this platform to gather information about the good and services they want and need. As a matter of fact Pinterest is my second largest source of website traffic after organic search and I’m not even selling products!

So if you’re a blogger, service provider or a publication there are ways to grab a pinner’s attention and send them to your website. With that in mind here are 22 ways to improve your images to increase your chance of getting click throughs or even going viral based on the latest research:

1. Use only images that are a minimum of 800 x 1200 pixels with 2300 pixels maximum in length

2. Create images that are visually startling, unique, funny, helpful

3. Create infographics

4. Edit pin descriptions using keywords that could show up in search

5. Combining a call-to-action on a pin description brings an 80% increase in engagement according to RJ Metrics

6. Use a trending hashtag or a branded hashtag (do not use more than three hashtags because it looks too spammy)

7. Use the words; look, want, need and love

8. Pins with a price get 36% more likes than those without price

9. Use a description that contains about 200 – 300 characters

10. Do not use bitly. Pinterest thinks you might be spamming

11. Tutorials, guides, DIY & recipe pins see a 42% higher click through rate

12. Pins related to trending topics see an average of 94% increase in click throughs

13. Apply for Pinterest Rich Pins

14. File name on your images that contain targeted keywords

15. Images with multiple colors get repinned 3.25 times more than the ones with a single dominant color

16. Medium lightness is repinned 20x more than very dark images. Don’t post images that are too light or too dark, stay natural

17. 50% color saturation receives a whopping 10 times more repins than images totally de-saturated

18. Red beats blue. The winning combination is red, orange and brown as these images are receiving 2 times the number of repins as the blue ones

19. Images with less than 10% background get 2-4x repins than images more than 40% of white space

20. Images without faces sport almost 25% more repins. Only 20% of images on Pinterest feature a face

21. Images with a smooth texture are repinned 17x more than images with a rough texture

22. Pin descriptions are limited on Android so place your vital information in the first 125 characters

If you’re not sure where to start with Pinterest, or perhaps just want some additional tips to strengthen your current social strategies get free access to Chapter 1 from my Pinterest course.

YOUR TURN: What else would you add to this based on research?

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