Warfare Plugins

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Advanced Pinterest Sharing

Grow Your Pinterest Traffic with Super Optimized Sharing! (New Features)

by Dustin W. Stout

Since we started our journey to create the best social sharing plugin for WordPress we had a heavy emphasis on Pinterest functionality. Being that Pinterest is a traffic-driving powerhouse, we wanted to give our users the best possible Pinterest arsenal.

We were the first sharing plugin to deliver the ability to add a custom Pinterest image and description to the Pinterest share button. This feature became so popular, that even our competitors finally copied us caught on.

And now we’re taking it to a whole new level.

As great as the custom Pinterest image has been (just look at my own results), there still was something missing.

Because of the way in which Pinterest’s share API works, we had to encode the image into the share function. In non-technical terms, the image wasn’t loaded anywhere on the page, it was just a coded link to an image inside the Pin button.

While this worked fabulously for anyone who clicked on the main Social Warfare pin button, it didn’t allow for browser extensions such as the official Pinterest Browser Button or the Buffer Browser Extension to pick up on your custom Pinterest images if you didn’t manually place them on the page somewhere.

Another popular Pinterest feature that was highly requested was the ability to add a Pin button to any image on the page. This helped to alleviate some of the trouble with the Custom Pinterest Image not being visible on the page.

Taking that feature even further, savvy bloggers know that the images that drive the most traffic from Pinterest were tall images. Because of that, we created options for the Image Hover Pin Button to only be placed on images that meet your size requirements.

While this feature was a fantastic addition for those who do like putting Pinterest style images in their blog posts, there were still a great number of people who wanted to have the ability to hide their taller images and have third-party browser extensions be able to find them.

So we sought out a way to do exactly that. And, finally, after several attempts using different methods, we figured it out.

A (Truly) Hidden Pinterest Image

Dancing Pig GIF

Social Warfare – Pro now comes with the ability to add a Pin Image for Browser Extensions that will insert the image you’ve uploaded in the Custom Pinterest Image field for a given post/page into the page. This means that it will be picked up by browser extensions such as:

  • The Official Pin Button
  • Buffer’s Browser Extension
  • Sprout Social’s Browser Extension
  • Tailwind’s Browser Extension (Pinterest Pros will love this!)
  • Many others!

Your blog posts and pages will now be Pinterest optimized with greater sharing accessibility than ever before!

Set Advanced Pinterest Settings

Advanced Pinterest Settings

First head over to your Social Warfare Settings page and click on the Advanced tab. From there scroll down to the Advanced Pinterest Settings section and set the Pin Image for Browser Extensions feature to the “ON” position.

Next you have two different settings to configure:

  1. Pinterest Image Location: This allows you to choose whether you want the Pinterest image to be Hidden on the page or automatically inserted (visibly) at the Top of each post or the Bottom of each post.
  2. Pinterest Image Fallback: This setting allows you to choose what the plugin does when there is no custom Pinterest uploaded on a post or page.

Once you’ve configured these two settings, you’re ready to go.

But that’s not the only new Pinterest feature we’re rolling out.

Image Hover Pin Button Options

Many users have asked us for the ability to have the Pin button show up when a reader hovers over an image. And when we built it, some people asked if it were possible to have that button also share the Custom Pinterest Image rather than the image being hovered over.

So, we built that option into the plugin as well.

To configure this setting, head over to the Display tab in the Social Warfare settings page and scroll down to the Image Hover Pin Button section.

Advanced Pinterest Image Share Button

You now have two new settings you can configure:

  • Image source: Select Pin the image to allow users to pin the same image that is being hovered over. Or, select Pin the Custom Pin Image to force users to share the Custom Pinterest Image you’ve uploaded for that post/page.
  • Description source: Select Image ALT text to have the image’s ALT text used for the Pin description. Or, select Custom Pin Description to use the description you’ve written in the Social Warfare Custom Options.

Be sure to clear out your caching plugins to make sure the most current version of your website pages and posts are being served to your visitors after the changes.

Are there any other Pinterest features you’d like us to integrate into Social Warfare? Let us know in the comments below!

Reader Interactions

Comments

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  1. Corinna Frei says

    Hey Dustin,
    I love the plugin and I’m very exicited to be using it in combination with tailwind for my pinterest strategy…

    Still, I’ve got several questions and hopefully you can shed some light 🙂

    1) I can’t see the configurations for the image hover buttons. it just doesn’t exist in the advanced tab. However, it’s possible to hower and pin images on the blog. Do you have some advice?

    2) Can I – and if yes where can I – configure what’s copied into emails if people klick the share by email button? The link is funky and it’s only using the beginning of the article, no picture and nothing like ” Continue read here etc.” . Can I change anything about this?

    Greetings from sunny Germany, Corinna

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Hi Corinna! Danke for taking the time to comment. Let me see if I can answer these questions effectively:

      1. The Image Hover Pinterest button configuration is under the “Display” settings tab. Just scroll down until you see the Image Hover Pin Button section.

      2. We don’t currently have any way to customize email shares. It is, however, on our list of things to investigate.

  3. Kenal Louis says

    This is sweet. I’ve been using the free plugin for over 6 months and i’ve tested at least 6 different ones highly recommended… none could do what I needed to do with both Pinterest and other social networks. I’ve so glad there is a hover over share feature now. Just purchased the Pro license for a year.

  4. Anisa says

    This is great. A few requests:
    1) Could there be an option to show the pin in the post only when one has been created. I don’t like the backup option of featured image.
    2) Can we adjust the size of the pinterest image if we have it in the post?
    3) Would love to be able to offer readers multiple pins to choose from.

  5. Jenn | Unit 25 Creative + Consulting says

    LOOOVING these updates!! Especially that it will work with Tailwind now – whoot!

    Since you asked for suggestions, one thing that would make my day is the ability to have more than one custom Pin image. I’d love to turn on the Image Source option to use the custom Pin image, but I sometimes experiment with multiple Pin images, so I don’t want them all to revert to the same image. I don’t know if it’s possible to code it so we can use more than one custom image, but if so, I would be a customer for life. (Even though I probably already am. ?)

    • Dustin W. Stout says

      Glad to hear it Jenn! And to your point, I totally understand wanting to use multiple images and/or split test different Pins. The challenge is that Pinterest’s share API only allows for two scenarios:

      1. Choose from every image on the page
      2. Encode a specific Pin image that is automatically used when the Pin button is clicked

      We cannot modify this behavior because that’s just the way Pinterest’s API is built. I have an idea about how we may be able to build a split-testing ability in the back-end but it would still only allow for one Pinterest image on the front end (when someone clicks the Pin button). Unless Pinterest gives us special access to their API (unlikely) to modify what is scraped from the page when looking for multiple images, this isn’t something that’s possible at the moment.

      • Bart says

        A split testing functionality could be useful. Otherwise the functionality to load up multiple pins and then have the plugin cycle through them one-by-one every x days. X days could be defined by the site owner, some may opt for weekly, monthly or maybe even quarterly if they wanted to use seasonal imagery on their pins.

      • Christine Zelina says

        I know this post is over a year ago, but I just found it.. Has something changed with the ability to have more than one hidden image? Tasty pins allows you to set multiple hidden pins and they all show up when someone presses Pin. It would be great if Social Warfare can do it. Thanks.

  6. Alex says

    Update sounds good but not working on my end. More specifically, the hover pin button does not pick up the custom image/description. I will submit a support ticket.

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