Listen to the Pinterest podcast episode here (or go to “Oh So Pinteresting” in iTunes)

Besides the podcast you should check out the Oh So Pinteresting website as well. It’s a fantastic resource for using Pinterest in general, but especially for utilizing Pinterest in your marketing efforts and getting more traffic to your site or blog. Cynthia is a true Pinterest expert and has published some great videos and posts as well.

• Place the hover button in any of the 4 corners of images.
• Use any of the 30 included button designs for the hover button. They can be different from your page-level “Pin It” button.
• Upload or select your own custom button for the hover button AND the page-level button.

Here’s a screenshot of the new settings:

Plugin customers have spoken, and these were a few of the top requested features and took priority. But more is always under development.

Click here to purchase “Pin It” Button Pro (if you don’t already have it) and get these fantastic features now!

Just head on over to the affiliate site and sign up. It should be pretty simple to get started referring folks to the plugin through your site, email or social sharing.

Affiliate Program Sign Up

It’s been since May that the service from Pinterest to provide pin counts has been down for a lengthy amount of time, but I’ve noticed it’s been down for at least a few hours.

Whether you’re using our plugins or custom embed code, the count isn’t appearing for anyone at the moment. We’ll just have to wait it out.

Your “Pin It” buttons should still show up. Just not the count bubble.

Among the new features include 30 custom buttons, added social sharing buttons, and the ability to set featured images to be pinned.

We hope you find it useful. And as always let us know what other features you’d like to see added.

Read more about the “Pin It” Button Pro plugin

Previously…

Well it’s been 2 days now and the pin count coming from Pinterest is not working…anywhere.

Here’s what I posted in the support forums:

A few of you notified me yesterday that the Pin Count bubble wasn’t working on your WordPress site, and instead of a number showed a dash (“-”).

After doing a little digging, it doesn’t matter which version of the “Pin It” button plugin you’re using, or even if you’re using my plugin it at all.

Pinterest’s service for returning the pin count for any URL is currently down as of yesterday (May 28, 2012). We’ll just have to wait.

This applies to anyone using my plugins or even Pinterest’s own embeddable html/javascript.

Unfortunately, this means my newer plugin Top Pinned Posts currently can’t go out and retrieve pin counts either.

If you don’t like the look of the dash, you can go to the “Pin It” button settings in your WordPress admin and temporarily change the Pin Count to “No Count”.

Since so many sites use the “Pin It” button (plugins or not), I’m hoping Pinterest will resolve it sooner rather than later.

To get email notifications like these subscribe to updates here.

]]> http://pinterestplugin.com/pin-counts-down-may-2012/feed/ 0 http://pinterestplugin.com/top-pinned-posts-wordpress-plugin-now-available/ http://pinterestplugin.com/top-pinned-posts-wordpress-plugin-now-available/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:20 +0000 Phil http://pinterestplugin.com/?p=733 I’m excited to announce the launch of a brand new plugin! I’m calling it Top Pinned Posts.

It’s dead simple. For every one of your posts and pages it goes out to Pinterest and totals up your site’s pins.

And it’s done twice a day automatically behind the scenes. If you want, you can go refresh the pin counts anytime with one click.

For your site’s visitors, there’s a also widget to show off your most pinned posts in your sidebar.

I’ve had some beta testers tell me that it significantly increased their traffic and even revitalized some of their old posts!

Check out the Top Pinned Posts Plugin

I noticed three major changes to the popup window:

1. When hovering over each thumbnail, a white “Pin It” button appears.
2. Images less than 150 pixel height or width are now included in the popup grid for selection (or was it less than 200 pixels).
3. The description text now defaults to the image tag’s TITLE attribute. It used to be blank. However, it will still default to any selected text by the user which was the same behavior as before.

Below is a couple examples and a before and after of my wife’s photography blog.

Here’s the popup image selector before the May 2012 updates. Notice small images/thumbnails from the post itself aren’t included.

Here’s the popup image selector after the May 2012 updates (click for full screen). Many more images now mainly because of the small images/thumbnails from the post are getting included.

Finally here’s the description defaulting to an image’s title attribute.

The changes for #2 and #3 can be good or bad depending on how your site is setup.

You definitely want to fill out the title attribute for SEO reasons. And on this site I’ve been using the plugin SEO Friendly Images to automatically populate the title attribute with the name of the image. But I may have to re-think this as it’s been appending a number on it (since that’s how the file is named).

Besides those three changes, I think the bookmarklet also has updates related to pinning from YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, but I haven’t fully tested them out.

If you’ve found anything else please post in the comments.

Check out the new Pin Count Tool

It’s not a WordPress plugin, but one is in the works that gives you a pin count per post among other things.

Join the mailing list to be updated when it’s ready.

Note that Pinterest currently counts each variation of a URL separately, so the 4 most common are simply added up to give you the total.

For example, if you enter in pinterest.com, you’ll see this URL breakdown at the bottom.

And it has a Pin Count bubble!

If you didn’t already see the update in your WordPress dashboard, just search for “Pin It Button” on your plugins page.

Make sure you grab the one by me (pderksen) with “Pin It” in quotes. Someone else cooked up a plugin with the same name.

Here’s a video explaining how to install the plugin.

Along with the pin count it now lets you specify a pre-selected image, URL and description.

The tricky thing was showing a pin count while still keeping the user selection popup mode. Pinterest only offers the pre-selected image with pin count option in their embed code.

I had some beta testers try it out and hopefully most major bugs are squashed, but if you find any or have any features to suggest head over to User Support & Feature Requests.

I’ll be updating the Custom CSS examples to help people line up the button with other popular sharing plugins.

The official FAQ should also help with resolving most issues.

Other than that, I moved the “Follow” button widget to another plugin. Just search for “Pinterest Follow”.