How to Go Viral on Pinterest: Ignite Your Visibility

Achieving viral pins on Pinterest can seem like a mysterious art. But going viral is possible by following proven strategies. This guide reveals insider tips on how to go viral on Pinterest by optimizing your content, pin metadata, and marketing tactics. With deliberate effort, your pins can resonate widely.

Understanding the Basics of Pins on Pinterest

Before diving into viral strategies, it’s important to comprehend the fundamentals of how pins work on Pinterest. This establishes a foundation to build an effective approach.

What Makes a Pin Go Viral?

For a pin to go viral, it must resonate with Pinterest users and prompt them to actively engage through repins, clicks, reactions, and saves. The more engagement a pin receives, the more Pinterest will surface it to a wider audience in search results and recommendations. Viral pins often leverage trending topics, emotions, entertainment, humor, helpful information, or striking visuals. They provide value that pinners want to share.

Some key factors that can make a pin go viral include:

• Appealing to popular interests and passions among pinners
• Offering practical tips, hacks, or solutions
• Using humor or entertainment to delight users
• Tapping into seasonal trends and current events
• Presenting beautiful, eye-catching visuals
• Inspiring or provoking an emotional reaction
• Providing useful DIY instructions or recipes
• Showcasing creative projects, crafts, or gift ideas

Pins with these compelling qualities tend to get high engagement in the form of repins, clicks, comments, and saves, signaling to Pinterest that users find them interesting and worth amplifying.

Optimizing Your Pin for Maximum Exposure

To reach the broadest audience possible, optimize your pins by using high-quality vertical images sized at least 1000×1500 pixels, crafting clickable yet descriptive titles of 50 characters or less, including target keywords in the description, and tagging relevant boards. This gives Pinterest the signals needed to determine the pin’s topic and potential reach.

Here are some best practices for optimizing your pins for visibility:

• Use eye-catching, high-resolution vertical images at least 1000 pixels wide. Horizontal images won’t stand out as much in Pinterest’s vertical feed.
• Write clear, engaging pin titles under 50 characters focused on the value proposition of your content. Ask questions, use numbers, or highlight benefits.
• In the description, include detailed sentences incorporating keywords and phrases pinners may search for. This helps Pinterest understand the pin’s focus.
• Pin images do best with minimal text overlaid. Use large, bold fonts in contrasting colors for greatest legibility.
• Save pins only to the most specific, relevant boards to give Pinterest clear signals about the content’s niche.
• Use all available pin metadata options, like destination link, product tagging, alt text, and board sections.

Following Pinterest’s best practices for pin optimization gives your content the greatest chance of being discovered and shared widely.

Utilizing Keywords Effectively in Your Pins

Integrating relevant keywords naturally throughout your pin metadata allows Pinterest to understand the pin’s focus and connect it to searches by users interested in that topic. Tools like Google Trends, Ubersuggest, and Pinterest’s autocomplete can uncover valuable keyword opportunities.

When brainstorming keyword ideas, consider:

• Broad terms related to your niche, like “social media marketing”
• Specific long-tail versions like “Pinterest marketing strategy”
• Trending topics and seasonal keywords, like “air fryer recipes”
• Related products or brands pinners may search
• What questions users ask about your niche
• Variations like plurals, synonyms, and misspellings

Sprinkle these directly into your pin title, description, alt text, and board name where applicable. This sends strong relevancy signals to Pinterest. Just be sure keywords flow naturally.

Strategies to Make Your Pins Go Viral

When the fundamentals are covered, it’s time to employ tactics designed to trigger the algorithm and pinners.

Key Pinterest Marketing Techniques

Consistently implementing small Pinterest marketing tactics can compound over time to drive viral success:

• Post new pins frequently, ideally multiple times per day. This keeps your brand top of mind and gives more content opportunities to take off.
• Vary posting times to determine when your audience is most active on Pinterest. Promoting fresh pins during peak pinner activity hours may boost initial engagement.
• Create multiple pin variations for evergreen content. Test different images, angles, captions, and custom graphics. Give existing content new life.
• Curate content into thematic boards around topics pinners care about. This shows Pinterest your niche focus while organizing content.
• Engage with other pinners by commenting on and liking pins you find interesting. Being active helps increase your visibility.
• Use promoted pins sparingly to give new pins an initial boost to get momentum during critical first hours.
• Let data guide your approach by digging into Pinterest Analytics to find your best content formats, timings, and topics. Then make more of what succeeds.
• Be patient and persistent. Viral pins can happen anytime, even months after first publishing. Consistency compounds over time.

Adopting these micro-marketing tactics as daily habits can significantly increase your odds of achieving a viral hit pin on Pinterest.

Designing Eye-Catching Pinterest Images

Visually compelling pins attract more engagement. Use bold text, minimal writing, contrasting colors, and negative space. Feature people’s faces. Leverage Canva templates. Try new styles consistently. Analyze top performers in analytics.

Some tips for creating eye-catching pins that convert:

• Use bold, legible fonts so pin text stands out when small. Avoid intricate scripts.
• Prioritize visuals over words with a clear focal point. Too much text blends together.
• Make key points pop with contrasting colors. Dark on light or vice versa.
• Include people’s faces to grab attention as users scroll.
• Zoom in on Photos to feature interesting details and patterns.
• Leverage Canva templates to quickly design polished, cohesive pins.
• Incorporate ample negative space around focal elements so they stand out.
• Maintain visual brand consistency with logos, color palettes, and graphic styles tailored to your niche.
• Analyze top performers in Pinterest Analytics and make more content in those styles.
• Test new design trends and styles consistently to find what resonates best with your audience.

Creatively capturing followers’ attention with engaging imagery they want to save gives your content a competitive edge.

Increasing Engagement with Repinning

Strategic repinning into group boards, personal boards with engaged followers, and your own thematic boards expands a pin’s reach exponentially. Avoid repinning the same pin to the same board repeatedly. Spread out repins over days and weeks for stability.

Tips for effectively repinning your content:

• Join group boards in your niche and repin content there to tap into new audiences. Provide value to the group.
• Repin others’ top content onto your thematic boards to help build relationships.
• Ask loyal followers with high engagement to repin your pins onto their boards for greater visibility.
• Repin your evergreen pins onto your own boards relevant to the content. Space it out over time.
• Vary the time of day you repin for stability. Don’t flood followers’ feeds.
• Utilize third-party scheduling tools like Tailwind to efficiently space out repins automatically.
• Limit repins of the same pin to the same board. Too much looks spammy.

Strategic repinning both your own and others’ pins is a powerful tactic to expand your content’s reach without appearing overly promotional.

Enhancing Your Pinterest Marketing Approach

As you find what works, continue optimizing your strategy using built-in analytics tools to propel viral success.

Utilizing Pinterest Analytics for Success

Link your website to your Pinterest account and activate analytics. Review performance data regularly to identify your top-performing pins, repins, keywords, and traffic sources. Then produce more content aligned with the high-flyers.

Key metrics to analyze frequently:

• Most clicked pins and boards to make similar content
• Top traffic-driving keywords to target in future pins
• Highest impression and engagement pins for inspiration
• Popular repins indicating broader appeal
• Best times of day or days of week to inform scheduling
• Highest click-through or conversion rate pins to emulate

By allowing data to guide your Pinterest strategy, you take the guesswork out of what resonates best with your audience. Lean into what already succeeds.

Driving Traffic to Your Website through Pinterest

Optimizing your website for Pinterest can increase click-throughs. Add the Pin It button plugin. Integrate rich pins for products. Enable link attribution in analytics. Create compelling pin-worthy assets centered on website pages you want to drive traffic to.

Tactics for driving website traffic through Pinterest:

• Install the Pin It button on site pages so visitors can easily pin your content.
• Create rich pins for your products to stand out in search results.
• Enable link attribution in Analytics to see which pins drive the most traffic.
• Design pin-worthy hero images and descriptions for important site pages to promote.
• Curate website content into thematic boards so pinners can dive deeper.
• Promote lead magnets and opt-ins with pins leading to those landing pages.
• Spotlight newly published website content immediately on Pinterest.
• Segment Analytics to assess Pinterest’s impact on overall site metrics like pageviews, conversions, and revenue.

Driving qualified traffic from Pinterest to your owned properties sustains viral impact long-term.

Creating Viral-Worthy Content for Pinterest

Analyze trending topics and emerging interests among your niche. Develop content that solves problems, stirs emotion, entertains, educates, inspires action, or taps into seasonality. Promote engagement with compelling CTAs. Test different angles and formats consistently. Let data guide your content roadmap.

Ideas for creating content primed for virality:

• Identify knowledge gaps in your niche and create pins that fill those needs with helpful tips or actionable advice.
• Tap into emotions like humor, inspiration, surprise and delight through uplifting stories, motivational quotes, or entertaining videos.
• Spot emerging trends early and quickly create related pins while topic interest is high.
• Highlight user-generated content like customer reviews or social shares to demonstrate broader appeal.
• Promote limited-time offers or seasonal deals to incentivize repins.
• Incorporate interactive elements like polls, quizzes, or fill-in-the-blanks to spark engagement.
• Test different content formats like step-by-step tutorials, case studies, product roundups, reels, and more.
• Always include a clear CTA prompting a specific next action based on your goals.

Watching metrics to see what your audience responds to best will guide you in crafting pins optimized for virality.

Conclusion

In summary, achieving viral pins on Pinterest requires commitment, optimization, promotion, creativity, and flexibility. As you refine your approach using available data insights, your chances of creating content that resonates widely on the platform will increase substantially. The lasting benefits of going viral make the effort well worthwhile, as your content continues reaching new audiences for years to come. Test and learn, stick with what performs, and watch your reach grow in 2023.