For hoteliers trying to reach travel planners, Pinterest is one of the best social media websites to have a presence. 28% of daily users say that Pinterest is their go-to source of information while travel planning. Pinterest users create Boards both to plan upcoming trips and to save inspiration for future travel.
Recent research from Phocuswright found that 40% of travelers choose their destination completely independently of other factors. In other words, they aren’t being influenced by events or proximity, and are flexible on where their final destination will be. That’s why having an active Pinterest presence to attract travelers at the “inspiration” stage of travel planning is so vital.
But how do you attract Pinterest users to your hotel website? As a photo-driven website, optimizing your website photos will have the greatest impact on how your photos appear on Pinterest and how impactful the Pin is. First, you need to have Pin-able photos on every page of your website. Then, you can use the alt text to optimize these images. We’ll show you how.
Add Photos to Every Web Page
Before, it was impossible to create a Pinterest Pin if a webpage didn’t have a photo. Now, you can still save a webpage to Pinterest without an image. However, if you don’t have a photo (or, if your photos are all in an animated carousel or pop-up lightbox) then Pinterest will generate a text box with your website description.
Here is an example of one such text-only Pin that was generated from our HotelCoupons webpage. We would bet that one of the photos with a hotel in it would perform much better on Pinterest than this text-only one.
Use Alt Text on Images
On websites, photos have an attribute called alternative text, or alt text. This is an HTML attribute that you use to describe the image. If the image can’t show or if a screen reader is being used, then the alt text describes what the image can be. It is important to use alt text on your website for accessibility and for giving context to search engines, who can’t see images but can read text.
For web images Pinned to Pinterest, the alt text is pulled as the default caption. The pinner can edit the description before Pinning, but many won’t. By setting your own alt text, you are ensuring that when an image from your website is Pinned, it will have accurate information and keywords to be found in search.
When you’re adding photos to your website of your hotel, describe them in the alt text. For example:
