No Images to Pin? No Problem!

(I wrote this for the Socialfish blog, but reposting here)

While Pinterest is a natural fit for brands whose websites contain a lot of images–like retail, fashion, food, bridal, etc–associations for the most part probably don’t fit that bill. Most association websites are almost exclusively text, and many are none too pretty either…sorry, but, truth. Yet with Pinterest’s popularity increasing steadily–in July, Pinterest had 23 million unique visitors–the temptation to establish a brand presence there is strong. But just setting up a Pinterest account doesn’t guarantee results–you have to have content to pin, right? And with no or only a few images on your org’s website, you might feel like your hands are tied. Or, you might have some images but find that when you go to pin them, all you get is the “no images detected” message.

But fear not–there are workarounds.

In the case of Pinterest not detecting the images on pages you’re trying to pin, Pinterest’s product designer explains on Quora that if a site is using Javascript to load images into a page, Pinterest won’t see the images. He suggests right-clicking on the image, copying the url, then adding that url to a new pin. Granted, when I tried it, it didn’t work…but such is the nature of Pinterest, sadly.

But you still have options. My favorite go-to Pinterest resource is Shotpin, a Chrome extension. Granted, it only works in Chrome, but it’s good enough and I pin enough that it’s made me switch from Firefox to Chrome for everything. Here’s a good tutorial on using Shotpin which saves me having to explain it–but basically it’s easy and lets you do a screengrab of part or all of a webpage and create a graphic of it to pin. Here’s an example of a pin I created from Shotpin:

Source: mizzinformation.com via Maggie on Pinterest

If you just can’t fathom using Chrome, you can try url2pin.it, which creates a screenshot of a webpage to pin. Or I also love Shareasimage (formerly PinaQuote) which lets you highlight text from a webpage and creates a pin of it which you can then link back to whatever page you want (note: for this example I used the pro version, which costs $6.99; the free version doesn’t allow you to change background or text color, or font).

Source: shareasimage.com via Maggie on Pinterest

Another workaround would be uploading images directly to Pinterest, then editing the pin and adding the url to whichever page on your site you’re trying to share. You can also create cool Pinterest-worthy images with text on them using Pinwords.

So before you go spending a ton of time and money having images created for each of your org’s web pages, try these workarounds.

Photo by katerha on Flickr

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