One of the biggest issues with Twitter for marketers is perhaps its greatest strength for others: text. This feature works great for news updates, mobilizing large groups, and creating a true fast and productive mobile communication method. But because Twitter relies heavily on shortened URLs and text to promote your message, Twitter becomes a sea of drifting headlines, with no other unique engagement to entice customers to click. Just the idea of text bores me from a product perspective and any marketer will tell you customers respond to images, video, and interactivity more than copy. Customers want to see the product in action, and then ask questions later.

Now Twitter can link to images, videos and more, but to a marketer the site has it backwards. Because everything is hidden by a shortened URL, something within your 140 characters has to entice them to click. Most may never notice it, and others may not even care. What’s even worse is that the site loses track of the original content provider, because it relies on retweets and @mentions to promote a message with all tiebacks generally getting lost in the masses. Whereas Pinterest relies on images, videos, comments, likes, and repins to promote that are pre-populated in your stream to catch your customer’s eye. Where on Twitter, marketers can only rely on trending hashtags as hail mary passes to reach new customers – not good.

Pinterest continually stresses the importance of populating your landing pages on your website with images. This allows anything and everything on your website to be promoted by the ability to “pin,” letting the image speak first, then your copy. After “pinning” an image you can embed a URL. This will allow the user to click on the image from the popup box and be taken to the original site of the content (in theory, your landing page).

You can also restructure the link, embedding tracking code into it to generate campaigns within your Google Analytics account to see if Pinterest is actually working. Another nice feature, is the ability to upload a pin. This allows you to ensure maximum resolution on your images that can sometimes be crunched down on your blogs or landing pages. From there, you can do the same: embed tracking code.

Like Twitter you can make customers aware of the specific links by posting them additionally in the description section via a shortner or the entire link. You can also populate with #hashtags to generate search queries within Pinterest for other related descriptive comments and content, and are allowed 500 characters in your description as apposed to the limiting 140.

I’ve always been annoyed that all of my content has remained hidden behind text on Twitter and how the site can seem like a scene from 1984, with trending hashtags dictating what my thoughts will be for the evening as a marketer. Pinterest is great, and provides a reflexing flip with how to promote on a social media site. There’s a reason Pinterest is referring the numbers they are and for a marketer this is good news. So let your images stand alone and break out of your Twitter funk.