Pinterest Success Story: BuzzFeed

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For those who don’t know, BuzzFeed is a news and entertainment website that features some of the most shareable, social content on the web.

BuzzFeed utilise Pinterest to find trending topics, see what’s trending and get ideas for stories. Since joining Pinterest, it has met significant increases in Pinterest referral growth and traffic. Here are five important lessons to learn from BuzzFeed on Pinterest:

1. Pinterest is a huge driver of traffic.

BuzzFeed first saw a spike in Pinterest traffic when Peggy Wang, BuzzFeed’s first editor, did a post in June 2012 about DIY projects. The post quickly gained traction on Pinterest, and convinced BuzzFeed that they should be focusing on Pinterest. Since then, they have seen over 2.3 million views to that first DIY post from Pinterest alone, and have increased their posts in multiple categories.

“Pinterest is BuzzFeed’s second largest social network referrer. It also has a much longer lifecycle than other social networks, often driving traffic to posts months after publication. In fact, more than half of BuzzFeed’s traffic from Pinterest goes to posts published more than 2 months ago,” said Dao Nguyen, VP of Growth and Data at Buzzfeed.

2. Pinterest is unpredictable.

Pins that get the most repins are not always the ones that drive the most traffic. Some Pins (like funny ones) are so compelling that readers click immediately to see the rest of the post. They may repin later, or they may not. Other Pins, like beautiful images of food or travel, get repinned a lot but readers don’t click through until later. The team has found that both types of content are valuable, even though they have different traffic patterns.

3. Pinterest is a good place to conduct experiments.

BuzzFeed posts from classic categories like Beauty, Home, Crafts, Fitness and Food do well on Pinterest, but they have learned that other topics like tattoos, books, Disney-inspired posts and humor do well, too. In fact, of the top 100 BuzzFeed posts on Pinterest, over 30% of the traffic are to funny posts. They’re always experimenting with new categories and posts to see what resonates, then adapting their editorial and product strategy based on that.

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BuzzFeed Featured Board

4. Make content easy to Pin, especially from mobile.

BuzzFeed readers love to share back to Pinterest, so the team makes it easy for readers to Pin by integrating Pin It buttons and “Follow us on Pinterest” widgets on their site. They also increased the size of the Pin It button on their share bars and on individual images for readers coming from Pinterest. 77% of visits from Pinterest to BuzzFeed are on mobile, so the team also makes sure their mobile site loads fast and is optimized for Pinning, just like their website.

“When a reader comes from the Pinterest app on mobile, we show the Pin It button right on top of the image. We found that this increased pinning by 10 times!” said Nguyen.

5. Learn what makes a great Pin for you. 

The BuzzFeed team has found that designing one Pinnable image—like this one of fruit-infused waters— that lives at the top of a post encourages more clickthroughs, especially when the image is tall and inspiring. They have also noticed that writing good Pin descriptions is important, especially if the image isn’t beautiful but is really interesting or useful. Positive descriptions are generally more repinned and clicked because they’re easier to discover. The team continues to study how Pinterest usage shifts as the community changes, and they use the data they find to inform their editorial and product decisions.

Some quick tips from BuzzFeed:

  • Experiment with new categories, like humor, and posts to see what resonates with followers.
  • Create custom images on your posts for easy Pinning.
  • Add the Pin It button to your site pages and images.