An invitation is still required to join Pinterest: you request one, wait briefly, and gain access. Yet the travel industry is discussing it more and more. When checking Google Analytics to see where their visitors come from, site owners are finding a new name among the referring sites, close to Facebook: Pinterest, a site most of their customers have never mentioned to them.
From Bali, working with dive operators, this network stands apart from the others. On Pinterest, people are not conversing: they are planning.
An evening spent browsing travel pins brings a few clear observations.
Why does Pinterest work for travel businesses?
Facebook shows what your friends are doing now. Twitter shows what is happening this minute. Pinterest is about the future: next summer's wedding, the kitchen to be renovated one day, the trip planned for when the children are older.
Travel fits this pattern perfectly. People begin dreaming about a dive trip months before booking, sometimes a year ahead. They collect photos of reefs, bungalows and sunsets on a board titled, for example, "Indonesia someday". Then, when the plan gets a date, they return to that board.
The goal on Pinterest is therefore not a quick sale. It is to be on that board from the start of the planning, with a link that still works when the time comes to book.
Pinterest also behaves more like a visual search engine than a social network. People type "Bali", "cabin" or "snorkelling" and browse the results. This aspect is likely to matter far more than the follower counts some are already highlighting.
Why favour tall images with one clear subject?
The Pinterest feed is a grid of narrow columns of equal width. A wide horizontal photo is reduced to a thin strip, while a tall one occupies a large part of the screen. Tall pins therefore stand out more.
For Pinterest, shoot or crop in portrait format, taller than wide. A panorama of the bay, however well executed, will go unnoticed.
The second criterion is the subject: one clear element per image. A manta ray against blue water works. A turtle with a diver in the background works. A crowded shot of the whole boat, twelve people, the dive deck, a flag and the island in the background does not: shrunk to a column in the feed, it becomes illegible.
The same applies to a business in Canada: a canoe on a calm lake at sunrise, an attractive plate on a wooden table. One subject, well lit, understandable within half a second of scrolling. If your photos do not yet meet these criteria, better photos are likely the first investment to make, before any platform.
Should text be added to the image?
Some of the most repinned content consists of recipes and how-tos with a short line of text directly on the photo. "5 easy dives for beginners" would work the same way. Keep the text short, in large letters, without covering what makes the photo effective. We recommend testing this approach on a few pins and observing which are repinned before applying it everywhere.
Why should every pin lead to a real page?
This is the aspect most businesses are currently overlooking.
Many upload photos directly to Pinterest with no link at all, or with a link to the home page. Someone admires your reef photo, clicks, and lands on a generic welcome page with a slideshow. Where is the reef? How do you get there? What does it cost? The visitor leaves.
Every pin should point to the page that matches it. The manta photo leads to the page about the manta dive. The room photo leads to the page for that room, with rates and a way to book. A fall colours pin leads to your blog post about autumn weekends in the area.
Those pages must therefore exist, which is the least visible part of the work. Pinterest does not deliver results if your website has five pages and none of them is specific. In a sense, Pinterest acts as a test of a site's quality, and many sites do not pass it.
Also pin from your own website, not only from your phone, and add a Pin It button to your pages so guests can do the same. When a pin originates from your page, the link travels with it every time it is repinned. Those repins continue to circulate long after a Facebook post has disappeared from news feeds.
Why organize boards by theme rather than one large board?
The typical business board is currently titled "Our Dive Centre" and holds four hundred photos: boats, fish, a staff birthday cake, a sunset, the new compressor.
Nobody follows such a board, and nobody searches for it.
It is better to start from what people are planning and build boards accordingly. For a dive resort, the following set is relevant:
- Courses, from a first try to instructor level.
- Marine life that can actually be seen, species by species.
- Rooms and the resort.
- The island, the food and activities for a day off.
Each board has a name people might search for and stands on its own. Someone planning a first dive trip follows the courses board. A photographer follows the marine life board.
A cottage rental business would apply the same method with seasons, activities and the cottages themselves. The approach is straightforward.
What should you know about copyright and the nopin tag?
A significant debate currently surrounds Pinterest and copyright. Much of what is pinned consists of photos the pinner does not own, which has caused dissatisfaction among photographers. Last month, Pinterest provided site owners with a small piece of code, a "nopin" meta tag, that prevents pinning from their pages.
For most travel businesses, we recommend leaving pinning enabled. It is in your interest for your reef photos to circulate with your link attached. Simply make sure they are your own photos. Do not pin other people's work on your business boards as though it were yours, and if a photographer produced images for you, verify that your agreement covers this type of use.
Is Pinterest worth your time?
For many small businesses, Pinterest is likely to prove more effective than expected, even though it is not yet taken seriously. It requires less daily attention than Facebook, and a pin created this spring can still be bringing visitors to your site next year, which is rare.
It does not suit every business. A plumber does not need it. A B&B, a restaurant, a craft maker, a guide, or any business whose customers plan or dream about their experience in advance, is likely to benefit.
Pinterest does not yet generate significant revenue, so dedicated tools for businesses are likely to appear soon. We recommend following Pinterest's business side for these developments. In the meantime, the basics require no special tools: good tall images, real pages behind each pin, and boards that match what people are planning.