We recently covered the biggest social media brands to launch Stories on their platform to a huge response from our publisher friends. So, we have decided to cover each of these a little more in detail, to answer all your questions. We’re starting this second wave of coverage of Social Media Stories, with one of the more recent entries to this space – Pinterest Story Pins.
First off, what are Pinterest Story Pins?
Pinterest is one of the world’s premier bookmarking sites, made famous by their “Pin It” extension. Taking a page from “Snapchat Stories,” they have added a more visually appealing and engaging tool that allows everyone from creators to publishers to create image and video heavy content, that will amp up the engagement for any publisher site.
From Pinterest’s own launch page, here are their 5 recommendations for “Pinners”:
- Install the official Pin It button on your website to make it Pinterest friendly—you’re helping your readers share and distribute your content on your behalf
- Optimize your images by pairing your content with beautiful, high-quality, vertically-oriented images
- Write thoughtful Pin descriptions that provide context—we’ve noticed that positive messages resonate well with Pinners
- Get article Rich Pins to highlight your article headline, author and story description, giving readers a preview for what they’re about to read
- Learn what captivates your audience with Pinterest Analytics and refine your editorial strategy
Pinterest for publishers
Pinterest is known for driving more media traffic than LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit combined (you may be surprised) and are known to help drive traffic to publishers’ sites. That’d be the first question we’d urge publishers to ask themselves.
In that regard, Pinterest is definitely a higher intention social media site for publishers (especially magazines) to reach their audience. Even from their early days, Pinterest courted and successfully built a media heavy site for magazines and publications to build an online presence on your mobile phone. A case in point, Buzzfeed:
“We think of Pinterest as our newsstand,” said Emily Fleischaker, BuzzFeed’s creative director. “We have to think of what works on Pinterest and mobile Pinterest every step of the production process.”
Other brands that have built a serious presence on Pinterest include Hearst, Harper’s Bazaar (with over 5 million followers on Pinterest) and others. So, given the obvious benefits of the platform that caters to publishers, Story Pins sounds like a terrific way to get closer to the magazine dynamic that Pinterest has always built towards.
We’d love to hear from you on whether or not you think it’s a great idea to add Pinterest Story Pins to your storyboard ideas!
Rating: 4 / 5
Publishers, bloggers, and creators, especially the owners of small businesses or large blogs and media outlets should give this a try. The platform caters to creators and this might be a great way to get in front of a highly engaged audience, depending on the topic of your blog.
