Are Your Posts Looking Their Best on Pinterest?

Have you ever wondered why, when you go to pin an article on Pinterest, some images will be accompanied by a brief title while others by a log tract of text? Have you ever wondered how text below the pin affects the fate of the pin, or what contributes to the pin being easily found or getting repinned?

Since Pinterest changed the way it displays pins to your followers, it’s even more important than ever to be sure your posts will be properly labelled when readers pin them. A brief, relevant description that contains one or more keywords will fare much better than other pins. So this is the standard to aim for.

But have you noticed that when you pin posts from LiteracyBase, they come up either with a short unrelated description such as, “image from Pixabay,” or a big block of text? This is because the featured images on LiteracyBase are being submitted with no alt text.

@RapidBlue has pointed this out to the staff, and she has asked for the alt tag field to be added to the post form. While we wait for the staff to make this happen, there are some things you can do to help ensure that when readers pin your posts, they’ll display with the text you’d like to see. Read on to learn more.

What Happens When a Reader Pins Your Post

Pinterest will generally try to pick up information for your image alt tag in order to caption your image on their site. It may also look at other fields such as the title, and if it finds no information in any of the fields it searches it will simply copy the beginning of the post and use this for a Pin description.

This is why some pins have a nice, neat, compact description that contains a title or the keywords for the linked content, while others seem to have a long paragraph that Pinterest users have to wade through in order to see what the pin is about.

How Your Pin Description Affects the Fate of Your Pin

Because Pinterest now displays “suggested” pins to your followers rather than simply showing new pins in chronological order, Pinterest is now determining whether your pins should be shown to your followers. Some may not be shown to any followers, and of course that defeats the purpose of pinning!

Each of your pins now has to compete with a ton of other pins for ranking, much as your articles compete against others for search engine ranking. I won’t get into too many details here about what makes a pin worthy to Pinterest. What I will say is that you can help improve the fate of your pin if you take a few simple steps to be sure the description that gets added to your pin will accurately describe the content, and will help Pinterest to properly categorize the pin.

What You Can Do to Ensure Your LiteracyBase Posts Will Pin Correctly

1. Whenever you have the option to enter alt text for an image, just do it! Be sure to describe the image concisely, or to write in a brief statement that relates to the topic of your post. Use between 100 – 200 characters, about the same as you would for a Tweet. This is the optimal Pinterest description length recommended by Hubspot.

2. Be sure to use a keyword or two, as close to the beginning of the description as possible. You can also include one or two relevant hashtags.

3. If there is no alt text field, see if you can edit the image title (yes, you can do this on LiteracyBase.) Use the title field to add your pin description, including any keywords or hashtags you think will help the pin get noticed. This information will now get picked up as the pin description.

4. If unable to edit the title once an image is uploaded, simply rename the image before you upload. This ensures the text you want will be in the right field!

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