Adding clickable image posts on Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn with SM Tasker

Some of you probably don’t know what these are as the term “clickable image” sounds funny to you. However this is a well used tactic on Facebook for example to drive traffic to where you want it using an image that would attract a lot of clicks but that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the destination to where you’ll send all that traffic.

What Clickable image posts are and the platforms you can use this feature on

The Clickable Image Post functionality will allow you to create posts that will have a lot more interaction as they will basically be a huge photo that attracts attention and will also be clickable, sending anyone who clicks it to your site. It’s an amazing way to drive interested people right to your site and your conversion rates will skyrocket. Clickable Image Post is available for all the campaign types: Standard, Scheduled and Volume Campaign.

These are called clickable images and you can do that now from within SM Tasker for  Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest – post images that will actually attract users to click and go to your site. Just make sure you use it the right way and don’t piss other people off.

You can use images that are very appealing and make users want to see where they go, however, if you abuse this, people might get upset. You can use images that have nothing to do with your site or images extremely relevant to it.

How to set up the clickable images server

In order to use this feature a little setup work will be required. You just have to do it once though. You will need to create a few servers that SM Tasker will use to post these kinds of posts. Because you’re setting this up on your domain, that domain url will appear underneath the clickable image post. You need to upload a folder with two files to your website, this will make it so the link shown below the picture is about your website as well. You can also upload the files to another hosting/website but the url of that website will be shown there. If you don’t have a problem with that you can upload the files anywhere you want, it’s actually the big image that will attract most of the attention anyway.

Get the files from here. They are archived so you will need to extract them to your computer after you download them. You can open the files and take a look inside if you want, they are not encrypted so you see everything there, that’s if you want to make sure you’re not uploading anything bad to your site( we assure you everything is totally safe). After the folder is extracted you can rename it and upload it anywhere on your server. Make sure you remember the url where you uploaded them to.

For this example let’s say you upload the folder in your public_html folder that means they are in your root directory. Let’s say your site is http://www.mysite.com , you have just uploaded the folder into public_html so the link you need to remember is http://www.mysite.com/imagex ( imagex is the name we gave to the folder, you can change it to anything, just remember to use it with the correct url ).

That was the setup that was needed, now just check that you did everything correctly. Go to the Settings tab in SM Tasker, go in the Connectivity sub-tab and under the “Clickable image post servers” add your newly created url. It can be something like “http://www.mysite.com/imagex” , “http://www.mysite.com” or even “http://www.subdomain.mysite.com”

Notice you can have an url with no imagex there as if you ditch the folder and uploaded both files in the public_html folder, if you uploded the files with the folder it should be under /imagex or any other name you gave your folder. This is all you need to do to set up your own server.

Now just click on the “Get test url” and a message should appear stating that a clickable test image post url has been copied to clipboard, now go to your browser , click the address bar and paste that url there. Once it’s there click enter, it should redirect you to wikipedia.com as that’s how it was set up for testing purposes. If it does, it means everything is set up correctly and you can start posting clickable images from now on, if not, check the instructions again maybe you missed a step.

These servers are global and they will apply to all the accounts that you want to use this feature with. If you want a specific server to be used with a specific account, you can add that clickable image server for that specific account in Social Profiles – Setting ( for each account). Scroll at the bottom of that page and you will see where to add it.

If you enter several clickable image servers here each time one will be randomly picked thus leaving less of a footprint on Linkedin or the other platforms, this is great if you post a lot.

In order to post clickable images after the server is set up just to go any campaign in the “What to publish” tab and click on clickable image post sub-tab.

(Screenshot here)

Just so you have everything ready before you start, you will also need to upload the image somewhere or use an image that’s already online, you cannot upload it through the software. If you have it on your site that is great, you can use it from there if not just upload it somewhere online where they accept free image uploads. You can use http://imgur.com for this it’s really simple to upload your picture and get a direct link from there and you don’t need to create an account if you don’t want to. Remember to use a high quality and big picture so your ad will look great. Ideally use a wide image as that’s the one social networks like best. Get the direct link to your picture from the site.

After that just enter all your details:

• The message you want to post, you can also use spyntax here.
• The title for your post – it’s highly advisable to use at least a minimum of spinning here as different titles will create different urls for SM Tasker to post.
• The image url. Make sure to enter a direct link to that image alone, not to a page that contains that image.
• The url where you want the user to be redirected after someone clicks the image.
• In case you don’t want the URL description to be automatic you can add your own in this last field.
• Source url – this is for Pinterest only.

When everything is done just click the “Add to post list” button and the post will be scheduled for publishing.

You can also import clickable image posts from csv in case you don’t want to enter them one by one like in the above example. In order to see a sample file just click on “click here for an example file” see how you need to format it, add your data in such a file and you can import as many clickable image posts as you wish.

Things to consider when posting clickable image posts:

• The icons for Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest are under the message, this means that a clickable image post will only be posted on the platforms, even if you have twitter destinations selected ( for example) those will be skipped
• As mentioned above try to use spyntax in the title of the post, it will create different urls for each different version of the title thus minimizing your footprint in posts. Alternately you can use several servers, just enter them in the Settings tab under “Clickable image post servers” one per line. This combined with spinning the title will make it so you pass virtually unnoticed.
• Just remember this is automatic, if not set up correctly it could post a lot and it could get you in trouble, take it easy, start with a test, increase the posting limit gradually and you should be fine.