While there might not be a way to look into a crystal ball and see the secrets of creating effective content marketing, understanding your Tailwind Analytics Suite is the next best thing. By learning what categories your audience is interested in, the boards they are engaging with, the pins that drive repins and the images from your domain that catch a users eye, you can gain a better understanding of what works – and what doesn’t work – for your brand.
Find Your Most Viral Categories & Boards
By starting with a broad view of what topics and categories generate virality among your users, it becomes easier for your brand to curate the content that drive repins and traffic. To understand the virality of the categories you pin to, just take a look at your category heatmap:
The bigger boxes indicate category boards that have been pinned to the most. The darker the boxes indicate the boards with a higher repin to pin ratio. As you can see, we pin a lot to the “technology” category, but our most viral boards are in the “other”, “geek” and “design” categories. So what boards are making the “other” category so viral?
Dig into the viral boards within the “other” category by clicking on the box. From there, we are able to see that the board “Social Media Tips” drives the virality of this category with 3.6 repins per pin. Knowing that, it’s now time to check out what pins are resonating with users within that board.
By looking into your board report, you can easily see which boards are doing the best for your brand. As we found with the heatmaps, the “Social Media Tips” board maintains the highest engagement score, though its virality is actually lower than the “Becoming a Pinfluencer”. This means that the content from the “Social Media Tips” board is resonating more with the brands followers (calculated as repins/pin/followers) while the “Becoming a Pinfluencer” board is resonating with all Pinterest users (calculated by repins/pin). Clicking on the box with an arrow coming out of it will take you directly to the board on Pinterest where you can explore which pins are leading engagement.
Want to see how a certain campaign board performs? Tracking the effectiveness of a board’s content during Pinterest campaigns is as simple as upgrading your account to receive date filters for your boards.
Pinning the Right Pins
After understanding what categories and boards lead your Pinterest virality, it’s time to take a look at how your pins are fairing.
Inspect your pinned pins to see which ones are receiving the most repins, likes and comments to see if you can find a pattern. For example, from Tailwind’s 50 most recently pinned pins found on the free analytics plan, the top two repinned pins happen to be long vertical ones (including one claiming vertical pins stand out more) from the same community board. Using this information, we might want to start pinning more vertical images and join more community boards to help our Pinterest virality grow.
After understanding your Pinterest profile, it’s time to look at the content being pinned from your domain.
Seeing what’s recently trending from your profile can give you a sense of what visuals make the biggest impact from your site. For example, trending from Tailwind’s domain are two images that are heavy on text with interesting backgrounds.
Also found with your trending pins, is the world-cloud of words commonly used by pinners in pin captions from your site. This lovely – and useful! – graphic gives you insight into the conversation surrounding your brand. For Tailwind, the conversation is dominated by “Pinterest,” with an emphasis on “how,” “analytics” and “contest,” among other phrases.
So, by using the information we’ve gathered from our dashboard, we have a great chance of striking gold by creating long vertical images for the website, with lots of text and interesting backgrounds, pinned to community boards within our “other” category, especially if it’s about how to use Pinterest analytics for contests. The best part? All that information came from Tailwind’s free analytics account. Just imagine the content marketing powers having access to all your profile and trending pins, unlimited historical data, access to your peak pinning times, and competitive information could provide you!