Pinterest And Social Postings, Do You Keep Up?

I have mostly posted to Twitter (and a little on Facebook) and no, I will never go back and link check my old posts and I know there are bad links in there since I believe links will change if you ever edit the titles of your images here. But the lack of traffic and sales I get from social media make it not worth the amount of time and effort it takes to go through everything. That time could be used for far more productive things such as attacking photography projects.

That is just me though and I have never regarded social media that highly as a sales tool, nor is it a big part of my strategy.

Hi Jeff, I would always do this on Pinterest, highly recommended!

The half-life of a Pin (the time in which it earns half of the overall engagement, like clicks and view) is 3.5 months - about 1,600 times longer than a Facebook post. Source: Small Business Trends.

I am really thankful that Sean redirected all traffic from *.artistwebsites.com to *.pixels.com. I always pin from my Artist Website (because I can use Google Analytics) and it would be a real nightmare if I would get lots of bad links. Some of my pins have been repinned several thousand times. I have pins that are some years old and still generate traffic to my Artist Website.

Unfortunately there is one big problem with bad links. Editing the link on your own pins does not change the links on all the pins that people had saved before. And there is nothing we can do about this (if we can't redirect).

Pinterest Marketing for Artists

Even if you delete a pin the repins are still out there, just that when people click on them they go to a general search page. I personally am not going to worry about it. I wouldn't be surprised if 20%+ of the pins I've saved by others have dead links. The pretty pictures are still there. ;)

You could always get your own URL Shortener. http://tnot.es/Pics

Then you can change where the short URL points to in the database, with a click of the mouse.

We have short URLs on all our country pages and I've just gone through changing all the resolving URLs to the https version.

ie: http://tnot.es/MA

Oh, Travel Pics, that is an awesome idea... I have a thousand or more pins of my own material but that is a good way to start. I use Bitly and I believe I can do that as well. I will check it out...


Travel Pics... The first issue is that it won't let me pin with a shortened url. It wants the https://vistaphotography.pixels.com/products/2-dawn-arrives-motif-1-jeff-folger-fleece-blanket.html and not the http://bitly.com/2ipIbuu
Thoughts?

Pinterest is very picky with URL shorteners, seems like some spammers used them in the past. As handy and useful as they are, they can be misused.

Pinterest Marketing for Artists

You could always paste the short URL in the description. Not ideal but still gives a permanent reference when something changes.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/178666310186853849/

Extend on that by posting in the comments, as links seems to go live in there:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/178666310200118015/

To be honest, I don't use Pinterest that much but do dip in and out.

I need to look closer at it, as I see people pin our pics without crediting the source; in that they save to their computer or somewhere else and pin from there.

Links to somewhere else, but my description is on the pic.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/319966748517327216/

Uploaded by user:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/362750944971476670/

I've added comments on both of those but the comments are hidden unless someone clicks on comments.

:(

Pinterest is a lot of work to stay on top of.

Dealing With Bad Links

I can't stress enough how important it is to have (and keep) our own domain names and web-hosting, then just CNAME a subdomain to the White Label (which ArtistWebsites and affiliate sites are effectively called) and keep the www.subdomain A Record on our own server (in case the affiliate goes down and we need to mirror something quickly).

Jeff - Did you have a custom domain on Photo Shelter?

I used to use SmugMug until they hiked their prices, then moved to Fine Art America.

I just realised that the Pinterest link I posted earlier - https://www.pinterest.com/pin/178666310186853849/ - was pinned from SmugMug (must have been a few years ago)

http://photos.travelnotes.org/Oceania/Australia/Sydney/11939695_f7vkhr#!i=845587458&k=JF5Kq

As the SmugMug (custom) links were too horrendous to mirror effectively or redirect individually, I set up a 404.shtml (default Page Not Found) redirect on the https://photos.travelnotes.org/ subdomain to my custom URL here - http://pics.travelnotes.org/

Not the best solution, but a great catch all and only takes seconds to do. I also unpointed the photos subdomain from SmugMug and set it up on Travel Notes.

Now all old social media links to http://photos.travelnotes.org/Anything-Goes-Here will redirect to my custom page on Fine Art America. If I leave Fine Art America, I can then re-route to somewhere else.