Pique Your Audience’s Pinterest

Tips and Guidelines on Creating Captivating Pinterest Content

Pinterest is best known as a platform for inspiration. With millions of images and videos of exercise tips, make-up tutorials, recipes, home décor and everything in between, Pinterest has content for every taste and interest. Currently sitting in the top 10 most popular social media platforms in South Africa, in a poll early this year,  42% of South African internet users reported that they used Pinterest in the last month. According to recent statistics by Statcounter, Pinterest has 35% of South Africa’s social media market share, only second to Facebook at 48%. Its rising popularity, coupled with its unique features as a visual search engine and strong driver of website traffic, make it an ideal platform for businesses to utilise as a marketing channel. At the Black Snow Group, we believe that utilising the right social media channels is paramount to a great social media strategy, so we have provided some insights and guidelines on how to use Pinterest to its maximum potential.

Why Pinterest?

Aside from a large and rapidly growing user base of over 322 million, Pinterest users (or “pinners”) are also willing and financially able to use this platform to make purchases. According to a Pew Research study, high-income households are twice as lightly to use Pinterest as low income households. Additionally, according to Pinterest’s 2019 report, 98% of pinners report trying new things they find on Pinterest and 83% have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest. Pinterest is also the only social media platform that serves as a visual search engine, a unique offering that speaks to the increasing need for this function among the Gen Z and millennial generations. With shopping being cited as a top priority for 48% of Pinterest users, it’s unsurprising that Pinterest revenue from shopping ads increased by 100% from 2018 to 2019, with the number of active advertisers doubling in 2019.

Pinterest Guidelines and Best Practices

• The first step to utilising Pinterest for your business is to create a business account. This will allow you to use all the ad and promotion features that the platform offers. Ensure that you fill in all your business information so that potential customers can find you.
• Connect your account to your other social media accounts as well as your website. This allows pins from these platforms to be attributed to your business and it will allow you to track related analytics as well as website traffic and analytics.
• Ensure that your business description, board and pin titles, as well as your product descriptions are optimised for SEO. Remember that Pinterest functions as a search engine so using the right keywords and doing research on what keywords and hashtags are trending will help your customers find your pins and boards more easily.
• Ensure your videos and images are of a high quality and sized correctly. The recommended Pinterest pin image size is 1000 x 1500 pixels with a 2:3 aspect ratio and the recommended dimensions of your profile picture is 165 x 165 pixels. As Pinterest may adjust their recommended sizes or ratios from time to time, when in doubt, always check their guidelines before posting.
• Plan your content 30-45 days in advance and align your content with life moments and holidays. According to Pinterest, pins that align to holidays and life events saw a 22% lift in sales
• Emphasise media and marketing in the beginning of campaigns for new products. According to Pinterest, households that use Pinterest are 29% more likely to try a new product within the first 10 months of launch than non-Pinner households and, when looking at the first 30 days after launch, the Pinner “trial rate” was 40% higher than that of non-Pinners.
• Try to show a product/service in action. According to Pinterest’s best practices, pins that do this are 67% more likely to drive sales.
• Ensure your pins have a strong call-to-action in text overlay as this shows a 6% sales lift
• Pins that drive traffic to landing pages with similar imagery see a 13% increase in online sales
• Make use of pins that promote a special offer as this drives a 61% email conversion lift
• Ensure your pin descriptions include a brand name in the first line as this drives a 54% higher email conversion lift
• Ensure your pins have pricing details in the description as this has shown to drive a 28% lift in online sales
• Frequency: Post at least once a day (ideally 5 times a day)
• Create multiple pins for a post.
• Best post times are Saturday 20:00-23:00 and Sunday 20:00

It can be difficult to effectively utilise all your social media channels effectively without a strategy to tie them and your goals seamlessly together. At Black Snow we don’t just provide the strategy, we fully implement every detail, leaving you to focus on other important aspects of your business and reap the benefits.