Knowing how to choose the best board names on Pinterest in 2022 is an essential part of being found on the SEO-based platform, alongside creating the best pins and best strategies. In this article, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about naming Pinterest boards so you get more re-pins and traffic.
HOW DO I START A BOARD ON PINTEREST?
You start or create a board on Pinterest in three easy steps. These are:
1. Making sure you’re logged into Pinterest, click on your profile photo on the top right-hand side. This will display your boards. 2. Click the + button on the right-hand side and select ‘create board’ from the dropdown menu. 3. Name the board, choose if you want to make it secret and press the red ‘create’ button. You’re done!
WHAT SHOULD I NAME MY PINTEREST BOARDS IN 2022?
Your board names on Pinterest should use words that people are already searching for inside the app, so that your board has the best chance of being found. You can find out the best terms – often called keywords – by searching yourself and seeing what Pinterest suggests for you.
As an example, if I put ‘yoga tips’ into Pinterest, there are suggested terms just below including ‘for beginners’, ‘for beginners 30 day’ and ‘for beginners flexibility’. I can also see a range of pins below these suggestions. In the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the search bar, you can also set it to ‘boards’ and see what boards are called ‘Yoga tips’. There are a LOT of results!
So while you CAN name your board ‘Yoga tips’, it’s going to be difficult to set it apart from all the other boards with the same name. If you niche down more in the name, perhaps with ‘Yoga tips for beginners’ as Pinterest suggested, that would help beginners find your board.
To target more advanced yogis, you might type ‘Advanced yoga’ into the search bar, which will suggest terms like ‘advanced yoga flow’ or ‘advanced yoga poses names’. If your board names on Pinterest are these more niche terms, they’re more likely to be found and your pins are more likely to be re-pinned and clicked on.
HOW LONG TO MAKE A PINTEREST BOARD NAME
A Pinterest board name can be up to 50 characters long. You want the most important words at the front, because those are the ones that will show on your profile or in a search for boards.
Here’s what that looks like:
HOW MANY PINTEREST BOARDS CAN YOU HAVE?
You can have up to 500 Pinterest boards including secret boards and group boards you didn’t create. Secret boards are those that only you and other Pinterest users you invite can see (Pinterest calls these other people ‘collaborators’). Group boards are public boards that have more than one person able to add pins.
HOW TO WRITE GREAT PINTEREST BOARD DESCRIPTIONS
You have 500 characters for your Pinterest board descriptions. That gives you room to describe clearly what your board is about, using keywords near the beginning of the description. These can be a mix of popular, broad keywords and long-tail phrases. Long-tail phrases often start with ‘how to …’ or ‘how can I …’.
Mention if the board serves a particular niche, such as Etsy sellers or what transformation they can expect eg ‘learn how to take your own product photos’. Use keywords you found when searching Pinterest for your board names. Although writing a board name in capitals can make it appear bolder, it’s also more difficult to read, so using upper and lower case text is best.
HOW TO EDIT A PINTEREST BOARD
Edit a Pinterest board by: 1. Clicking on your board to open it and selecting the three dots for board options. It will show you an option to ‘Edit board’. 2. Here, you can change the board name, board cover, description, collaborators, make it secret, show pins inspired by the board in your home feed or delete the board. 3. Click the red ‘Done’ button to save your changes.
HOW TO CREATE PINTEREST BOARD COVERS
You can manually assign one of your pins as the board cover or Pinterest will choose a pin itself. This means you can make a board cover graphic and pin it to the board. Give it the board URL as its link.
Once you’ve saved the pin to your board, edit the board and choose ‘CHANGE COVER’. Choose the pin you have just saved as the cover. The pin you have chosen as a cover will usually appear as a square
The jury’s out as to whether this has an impact on gaining followers or repins, but speaking for myself, if someone has gone to the trouble of creating board covers, I’m more likely to think they’ve curated pins with some extra thought as well and am more likely to look at their content and follow them.
HOW TO ORGANISE PINTEREST BOARDS
Arrange your boards on your profile in a way that works for you. Pinterest offers automatic arrangements based on the alphabet or showing boards in order of boards where you saved your last pins. A third way is manual – you drag and drop your boards in exactly the order you prefer.
You can set which of the three options you want by looking at your boards and finding the ‘settings’ icon with two circles on two lines. Click on this to select your option.
I recommend you choose the drag and drop option, putting the most important boards for your ideal clients first. Click on a board and drag it to a white space between other boards. The first board will automatically contain all your pins or all saved products. You cannot move this board.
HOW MANY SECTIONS CAN A PINTEREST BOARD HAVE?
Pinterest boards appear to have unlimited sections. You can have at least 20 sections in a Pinterest board, which should be more than enough for one board.
HOW TO DELETE A PINTEREST BOARD
You can delete a Pinterest board in three easy steps. These are
1. Making sure you’re logged into Pinterest, click on your profile photo on the top right-hand side. This will display your boards. 2. Move your cursor over the board you want to delete. An option to edit with a pencil icon will appear. 3. Scroll down the board editing options and click on ‘Delete board’. Click the red ‘Delete forever’ pop-up button that appears.
WANT TO UPGRADE YOUR PINTEREST ACCOUNT?
To upgrade your Pinterest account easily and quickly, I’ve created this set of Pinterest pin templates you can download and be using in minutes inside online design tool Canva. The set of 31 minimal pin designs opens in one click inside your Canva account. All the fonts and design elements contained in the pin templates are free, so you don’t need the pro version. Just add your brand colours, drop in your own photos and swap the fonts/text and you’re done!
THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO.
There are so many marketing options for your photography business, it can be difficult to choose which are right for you. Here’s how to test Pinterest and find out if it is right for you.
Below are the simplest steps to test Pinterest. In no way is this a complete guide to setting up Pinterest. Many of the ‘best practice’ steps have been removed so that this entire test can be done in less than half a day.
If you find Pinterest is a tool you want to use, you might want to take additional steps to maximise your success.
YOUR PINTEREST STRATEGY
Pinterest is a search engine. This means you need to use keywords so that you can be found in searches. You also need attractive, striking photos that have enough impact to stop people scrolling through search results or their feed and click on your pin.
Everything that we’re going to do here is either keyword related or image related. Our goal is to drive potential clients to your website.
Describe yourself using at least one keyword and a location if you want local business. Examples might be Austin wedding photographer Julia Riley or Hampshire family portrait photographer Henry Higgins.
Profile hack: if the 30 characters Pinterest allows for a profile name is not enough, download the app to your phone and edit your profile there for up to 65 characters.
Add a close-up photo of your smiling face or whoever runs the business to your profile. A photo – even a close-up selfie – wins hands down for warmth over a logo any day.
HOW TO SET UP YOUR PINTEREST BOARDS
Create six boards on relevant topics for your business onto which you can pin your photos. These might be, for an Austin eco-friendly wedding photographer: Austin wedding photography, Laguna Gloria weddings, Barr Mansion weddings, Austin wedding flowers and Green weddings in Austin.
For Hampshire family portrait photographer Henry Higgins, these might be: Hampshire family photo locations, Hampshire children’s portrait inspiration, What to wear for autumn family portraits, How to hang family wall portraits, Hampshire baby photographer and Hampshire family portraits.
On each of the boards, describe in at least two sentences what that board is about, using as many relevant keywords as possible. For Green weddings in Austin, this could be: “Austin’s best eco-friendly wedding suppliers and ideas for how to plan a green wedding. Have a more sustainable wedding day with inspiration for environmentally friendly venues, favours and wedding dress.
For Hampshire family portraits, you might write: Hampshire family portraits including baby photos, cake smash ideas, toddler portraits and three-generational photography. If you’re thinking of professional family photos in Basingstoke, Winchester or Andover, have a look at our family portraits.
Board description hack: If you need keyword or description inspiration, search Pinterest for your main terms, but NOT your location. This will give you some of the strongest keywords on Pinterest and avoid you being too similar to your local competition.
If you have existing boards on subjects not related to your business, either delete them or make them secret, so only you and others sharing the board can see them.
HOW TO CREATE STRIKING PINS FOR PINTEREST
Your pins need to be a single vertical image in a 2:3 ratio. Avoid collages – they don’t have as much impact. Choose photos that are easy to understand and have simple messaging such as a loved up bride and groom or cute child cuddling their parent.
A note for those of you grumpy about simple, single, vertical images, I hear you. When I shot weddings, 90% of my photos were horizontal, storytelling photos and my favourites were those that had layers of storytelling or something else interesting visually.
Pinterest is not the best place for these, sorry. It can be amazing, though, for strong emotional images and high contrast photos.
Vertical is best because it takes up the maximum amount of space for a single pin on either a desktop screen or phone. And that maximises the chances of someone stopping on your pin and clicking through to your website or repinning your photo to one of their boards.
You can take a vertical crop out of a horizontal photo for your pin that links back to your horizontal photo. If vertical absolutely won’t work, you can go square.
FILLING YOUR PINTEREST BOARDS
You’re going to add at least 10 pins to each of your six boards, linking through to content on your website/blog. Exactly how you do this is going to depend on your workflow and how you store your photos.
We’re then going to create another 90 pins which are going to get pinned to your boards over the coming month using a Pinterest scheduler free trial
Let’s start with the example of the Austin wedding photographer and her Barr Mansion weddings board. Let’s say she had shot two weddings at Barr Mansion and has one blog post on each. Given that she wants to create 150 pins overall (60 on the original six boards and another 90 scheduled), she might choose 25 Barr Mansion photos for that board (one sixth of the total pins).
She would go to her set of original files for the first wedding and scroll through quickly in something like Lightroom or Photomechanic and pull out six or seven that catch her eye for the board.
She would import them into Lightroom, crop all into a 2:3 ratio vertical photo, add a logo if she wants and export into a Pinterest pin folder.
Once done, she would go to Pinterest and select the Barr Mansion board and click on the plus button to create a new pin. She’ll be asked for an image, so uploads her first photo from her pin folder, adds a description and URL for that blog post and pins to the board. Repeat for the rest of the blog post pins and second Barr Mansion blog post.
That process is repeated for the remainder of the boards, adding only 10 pins to each board. The remaining 90 pins are going to be scheduled.
TOP TIP: As tempting as it can be to pin your main website address to your pins, you want to add the relevant post or page URL so that your visitors get exactly what they were expecting when they clicked through.
CUP OF TEA/COFFEE TIME
When you’ve created your 150 pins and your boards are looking abundant, time for a coffee or tea and congratulate yourself for having done all that marvellous work. You have a Pinterest profile to be proud of.
Next up, you’re going to schedule out pins for a month, because Pinterest likes content creators like you to be active. It isn’t enough for you to drop a few pins and run away for a few months.
But there are schedulers available that mean you ‘can’ do that. They will pin on your behalf.
For this exercise, sign up to Tailwind’s free trial of 100 pins via the green button on the top right hand side and connect your account. You’re going to schedule out three pins a day for a month.
Once you’re set up, keep an eye on how much traffic you’re getting from Pinterest. You can find this in your Google Analytics under Acquisition / Social. It can take some time for pins to build traffic, so it can be most useful to look for trends rather than absolute numbers.
Check whether your traffic from Pinterest is increasing, decreasing or remaining steady. If it starts increasing, there’s a strong case for you adding Pinterest to your weekly or monthly marketing.
If you’re struggling to find time to use Pinterest for your photography business, using a Pinterest scheduler could be the answer.
A Pinterest scheduler allows you to set up your pins in one batch and schedule them out, so that you could be scheduling your Pinterest content as little as once a month.
How good does that sound – marketing that only needs attention once every four weeks!
When you’re running a wedding or portrait business, chances are you’re either working alone or with just one or two others. Even if you’re outsourcing, you still need to manage what happens and when.
When it comes to especially busy times such as summer wedding season or the fourth quarter for portrait photographers, the pressure of shooting, editing, managing clients as well as marketing to make sure you have future business can be overwhelming.
This is why Pinterest is such a joy for photographers: you can just set and forget your Pinterest schedule for the month and get on with the rest of your working life. Unlike platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, you don’t need to engage further.
There are a great number of Pinterest scheduling tools available. Here are the three I believe to be the best for photographers with the reasons why.
1. PINTEREST SCHEDULER HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is a scheduler for many platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. It has a free 30-day trial where you can test its scheduling abilities and schedule pins for free.
Scheduling is done by selecting an image from your computer, adding a URL and description and scheduling it for a particular time and Pinterest board or multiple boards.
Hootsuite’s free trial allows you to schedule up to 30 pins at any one time. The minimum plan for £25 a month (as of September 2018) allows unlimited scheduling.
Pros: Unlimited pins. Being able to schedule other platforms at the same time such as Instagram and Facebook.
Cons: Manually choosing pin times can be slow. You could get flagged as a spammer for pinning to multiple boards at one time.
2. PINTEREST SCHEDULER BUFFER
Like Hootsuite, Buffer manages multiple platforms. You can schedule posts for: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and G+. It has a free account where you can schedule up to 10 pins at a time and a seven-day trial of its Pro account that allows you to schedule up to 100 pins at any one time. There is no overall pin limit. Buffer’s plans start with the Pro account for $15 a month.
Buffer has its own inbuilt graphics system where you can use a photo and add text to make a pin if you don’t have one already. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of something like Canva, but it is useful if you want to add some simple text to your photos.
Pros: offers analytics of pins so that you can find the best performing pins. Inbuilt graphics creation. Allows content queue with pre-scheduled times for faster pin scheduling. Shows pins with most repins.
Cons: None.
3. PINTEREST SCHEDULER TAILWIND
Tailwind offers scheduling for Pinterest and Instagram. The Tailwind Plus account is $15 on a month by month basis including 400 pins a month. Its annual plan is $10 a month with unlimited pins.
Tailwind’s free trial is for 100 pins without any time limit.
This is where it becomes difficult to compare Tailwind to Buffer and Hootsuite. Tailwind has two features which are not offered by any other Pinterest scheduler.
The first of these is Tribes. Tribes are similar to group boards where you can share your relevant content and repin content from others in that Tribe. It expands the reach of your pin, making it more likely to be seen, repinned and drive traffic to your website.
Tribes are usually around one particular topic or interest such as Engagement Photo Inspiration or The Wedding Creatives. You can also start your own and invite other pinners with Tailwind accounts to join.
Tailwind’s second unique feature is its queue of the best pinning times. You choose how many ‘slots’ a day you want to pin and Tailwind suggests the best times for you.
It means you can keep adding pins to your queue without having to manually set a time. It sounds like a small thing, but when you’re scheduling 100 pins or so, it adds up and means that your pins have the most chance of being seen.
Another Tailwind scheduling feature that is incredibly helpful is its multiple board scheduling. If you have multiple boards that you want a pin to be added to, you can select multiple boards and schedule a pin to be added to all of those boards with a set interval between each pin.
You might choose, for instance, to leave 24 hours between each pin, so your pin might go onto boards on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday rather than all four on Monday. This would mean that someone searching for the topic of your pin on Wednesday or Thursday has a far better chance of seeing it.
Tailwind’s fourth unique feature is ‘looping’, which is currently being rolled out. It allows your most popular pins to be repinned to boards after a certain interval, increasing the chance of existing website articles and blog posts being seen and saving you time in creating new content.
Pros: Up to 400 pins a month. Tribes. Looping. Built-in queue. Shows popular pins.
Cons: Covers two platforms.
WHICH IS THE BEST PINTEREST SCHEDULER?
The best Pinterest scheduler in my opinion is Tailwind, for its time-saving features and extra chances of repins seen through Tribes. However, I am also someone who pins more than 100 pins a month and writes regular blog posts that I promote on Pinterest.
If you’re someone who already has a scheduler such as Hootsuite or who wants one that covers multiple platforms, you might prefer Buffer. Do just bear in mind how much impact your Pinterest traffic could have on your business and the right choice for you is going to be the one that you use consistently.
Learning how to write the perfect pin description for Pinterest can mean the difference between you being found by your ideal clients and not showing up at all in their searches.
There are two parts to an ideal pin: the photo and the description. Given that Pinterest is a search engine, it’s the description that is going to determine if you’re found.
Below are seven tips for writing the perfect pin description for Pinterest to drive more traffic to your photography website.
WHAT IS A PINTEREST IMAGE DESCRIPTION?
A Pinterest image description is what is shown below the pin on Pinterest. A description can be either auto-filled from content on your site or can be added or edited by the pinner.
A pin description has three jobs. It helps explain what the pin is about, it helps the pin be found in Pinterest’s search function and it entices pinners to click through to your website.
DO I HAVE TO WRITE A PIN DESCRIPTION?
Ideally, yes. When you’re adding pins to Pinterest, writing a bespoke description gives you the best chance of your pin being found and enticing people to your website. It’s helpful in a similar way to writing individual alt tags for each of your website or blog photos. If you’ve been doing that, you already have great skills for writing pin descriptions.
DOESN’T PINTEREST ADD A PIN DESCRIPTION AUTOMATICALLY?
It depends. There are two ways of adding pins to your Pinterest boards. You can pin directly from your site, in which case Pinterest will pull through a description from your website or blog from existing content. You will want to check this content and possibly edit it for maximum exposure on Pinterest.
You can also add a pin while inside Pinterest. You upload a pin image, URL of where people should go if wanting more information based on your pin and a description. Note that Pinterest will force you to write at least one character in the description in order to pin.
#TIP 1: THINK ABOUT YOUR IDEAL CLIENT SEARCHING
When we are researching keywords for our SEO, we often think about the searcher intent. What are people searching for and why? It’s the same on Pinterest. Ask yourself what your ideal client is searching for?
Let’s say that your ideal client lives in the US and wants to get married in a Scottish castle. They might search for ‘Scottish castle weddings’, ‘Scottish castle elopements’ or ‘Scottish castle wedding photos’. At this point, they may not be searching for photographers, but if you come up in search for those terms, you could be hired ahead of anyone else who is writing a description optimised for ‘Eileen Donan Castle wedding photographer’.
Notice that they aren’t looking for the name of the venue or a city because they’re at the start of their search and don’t have that information yet. You could write other descriptions for similar pins which DO mention the venue for when your ideal client gets to that point, so you’re covered in both situations.
TIP 2: WRITE A COUPLE OF KEYWORD-RICH DESCRIPTIONS DESIGNED FOR HUMANS
Now that your keyword strategy for Pinterest is solid, write for people to read. To go back to the Scottish castle example, you might say: ‘Scottish castle wedding inspiration: a bride and groom elope to picturesque Eileen Donan Castle in the Highlands of Scotland’. Or ‘A bride surrounded by her three bridesmaids at her fairytale wedding at Dalhousie Castle, Scotland.’ You get the picture.
TIP 3: ADD HASHTAGS TO YOUR PIN DESCRIPTION
Pinterest now encourages hashtags, after years of refusing to have them as part of its search. While hashtags on Pinterest still seem to be a work in progress, early feedback from pinners is that hashtags help with visibility. So add a couple of hashtags to your descriptions. For the examples above, this might be something like #scottishcastlewedding or #scottishelopement
TIP 4: MAXIMISE YOUR PIN DESCRIPTION LENGTH
Pinterest gives you 500 characters for your description. This is roughly a couple of sentences and couple of hashtags, as we’ve described above. It’s enough for including multiple keywords and phrases that describe your pin.
Be aware that if your description is longer than 500 characters, Pinterest won’t warn you until you are adding your pin to a board and stops the process, rather than allowing you to edit your description. If you think you could be over the 500 characters, copy the caption to your clipboard before saving. That way, if it is too long, you can recreate your pin and edit your description to make it shorter rather than starting from scratch. (I have done this so many times – it is frustrating!)
TIP 5: ADD A CALL TO ACTION IN YOUR PIN DESCRIPTION
Tell people what to do – it really helps improve click-through and pinning rates. It might be as simple as telling people to ‘pin for later’ or suggesting they ‘click through to see the rest of this fairytale Scottish elopement’.
TIP 6: SPLIT TEST YOUR PIN DESCRIPTION
You can split test your pin descriptions – try pinning the same photo with different descriptions and see which gets most repins and drives most traffic to your site. You can check the number of repins in Pinterest analytics and see which of those have driven the most traffic to your website in Google analytics. You’ll find Pinterest traffic by looking in the Acquisition section and then under Social.
TIP 7: MENTION OTHER SUPPLIERS OR BUSINESSES
The chances are in many of your pins, that you can mention other businesses. If your pin is from a wedding, you could mention the Pinterest account of the relevant dress shop, florist, cake maker or venue.
You can mention a Pinterest account in the pin description by typing the @ sign and waiting for the dropdown, similar to using Instagram mentions. You may need to open another window and search for the supplier; not everyone has a Pinterest account and their account name may not be one that comes up easily.
It is helpful to the pinner (your potential client) to have details of fellow suppliers and the fellow supplier will receive a notification of your mention. It may even lead to them repinning your pin and closer relationships between the two of you.
So there are seven tips for writing the perfect pin description for Pinterest. Do try them out and see how they work for you.
In summary, the seven tips for writing the perfect pin description are: 1. Think about how your ideal client is searching 2. Write several keyword rich sentences for humans 3. Add hashtags 4. Use most of the 500 characters allowed 5. Add a call to action 6. Split test your pin descriptions 7. Mention other businesses
Do you want the perfect photo for Pinterest? How do you choose the ideal photo that gives you a chance of going viral – or at least helps attract people to your pin in their feed? Here are five tips to guide you to great pin photos!
THE GOAL OF THE PERFECT PHOTO FOR PINTEREST
Let’s start by looking at the goal of our pin. It needs to stop people in their tracks. It has to be strong enough to stop people scrolling Pinterest on auto-pilot while they’re watching Real Housewives.
In this case, we’re also talking about a pin that is made up entirely of a photo or a photo with some text on top, rather than a text only pin or one where there is a block of text and a photo alongside.
Let’s look at the qualities of a pin that stops users in their tracks – the one job of pin photos.
VERTICAL PINS ONLY
Your pin needs to be vertical and in a 2:3 ratio. Pinterest has told us directly this is what it wants. If you’re a photographer, you’re quite possibly reading this and screaming that your photos tell a story and that happens from left to right and all your best photos are horizontal.
You’re right. So many of the best wedding and lifestyle photos ARE horizontal. Possibly the toughest thing about Pinterest for photographers is that the ideal pin is vertical.
Vertical pins take up the most amount of real estate on the Pinterest – whether on the mobile app, tablet or desktop. This means vertical pins have the greatest chance of making an impact and getting people to stop and click on your pin.
Pinterest does not ban horizontal photos or pins, but they just are not as clear nor as likely to stop people in their tracks. And frankly, if you’re going to go to the trouble of creating specific pins for Pinterest, surely you want them to be as effective as possible?
A SINGLE PHOTO
You want your pin photo to be a single image for the most impact. Avoid collages, no matter how well done. A single image has the most impact and the most chance of stopping the scroll.
A SINGLE MESSAGE
You have less than a second to get your message across and your best chance of doing this is in a single image where the message is clear immediately. This is not the time for your award-winning documentary photo with multiple layers of storytelling. The potential client can see that when they visit your website AFTER they found your vertical photo with a simple message or emotion.
CONTRAST
Photos with the greatest contrast create most click-throughs. This means choosing your photos with the most contrast and you could even add a little more in post production just for your Pinterest pin.
You can turn your photos upside down to see what has the most impact if you’re unsure.
TEST
You can have all the advice in the world on the perfect photo for Pinterest, but ultimately you need to test what works for you. Try out multiple pins of the same photo in black and white against colour, try centering a couple in their portrait and with negative space or single portraits versus couple portraits versus groups.
Then check in your Google analytics which pins are working best for you. I’d love to know what you find out and wish you every success.
Have you ever wondered how to create a viral pin on Pinterest? Is there really a formula or is there luck involved? And if you’re just starting out, how can you even get seen on Pinterest?
Let’s start with your pin’s purpose: the number one job of a pin is to make readers stop scrolling and look at your pin. Because if no-one stops, it doesn’t matter how life-changing your blog post, idea or product, no-one is going to see it.
You can think of it as a heading on a blog post if you like – you need to get that right so that your readers will want to read your awesome blog post.
We’re going to look at the five essential elements of a pin that will stop your readers in their tracks and help get eyeballs on your blog or website.
1. YOUR PIN IS VERTICAL
If there was just one tip on how to create a viral pin, this would be it! A vertical pin gives you the most real estate in the Pinterest feed. Whether viewers are on their phone, desktop or phone, this will give you the most bang for your buck. The width of pins is fixed, so vertical pins take up more screen area.
The best vertical pins are usually a single photo, illustration or block of colour – it keeps things simple and easy to interpret for the eye. Food bloggers often put two photos, divided by the recipe title in text. To check if your photo is right, can you tell what it is inside one second?
2. YOUR PIN HAS CONTRAST
One of the least known tips for getting people to stop the feed for a pin is to make sure your pin has contrast. This can be in the photo – you can increase contrast in an app like Photoshop or in Canva, in its photo filters. And you can make sure that the text is on a contrasting background colour.
You can also have contrast between text and your photo or the background.
3. CLEAR PHOTO
You need a photo that communicates either the subject of your story in an instant or an emotion, to create a viral pin. Some popular pins don’t have photos, but if you want your pin to go viral, the extra attraction that a photo can bring is worth adding. Photos are easy to understand at speed – easier than text.
It can take time to find the right photo, so if you have an editorial calendar, why not do all your photo sourcing in one batch, so your photos are ready and waiting for when you create your pins?
You can source photos from stock libraries or you can take your own. Flat lays – photos taken from above – work well for pins, especially if you leave negative space in them for text.
There has been anecdotal evidence from bloggers having more Pinterest success with photos they have taken themselves or is at one of the higher price points from a stock library.
These findings make sense if you think about Pinterest’s image recognition capabilities – it can get confused if the same stock photo is used over and over for multiple pins on a range of topics. If your image is clear, your pin is more likely to be shown with relevant recommended pins.
To create a viral pin, you need people need to be able to read your text AT SPEED. This means, most of the time, that you should avoid script fonts, especially when all the characters are capitals. Most script fonts are just too difficult to read. Add in that they are often placed on top of photos and you have a recipe for indifference.
Your eye finds it easiest to read a mix of capitals and lower case text, but you can make one or two important words in capitals as a disruptor, so that the reader is more likely to stop on them.
Make sure that if the words are on top of your photo, that they are clearly separate. If they’re not, you can add a translucent colour block in between your text and photo. It’s easy to do this in Canva and an opacity of around 50% is a good starting point.
To check if your pin is easily legible, you can squint a little while looking at it, taking it slightly out of focus. If you can read your pin easily this way, you’re doing well!
5. SOLVES A PROBLEM / HELPS A DREAM
This is where the magic happens! You need the other four factors to make your pin strong, but your words are what is going to take your pin viral – or not. Your pin needs to solve a pressing problem or help fulfil a dream.
You’ve probably already thought about this with your blog post topic and title, so you’re halfway there. Pull out the essence of why someone might read your post – how does it help them? – and write that on your pin in a short, pithy heading.
If you’re not sure or you think there are multiple headlines, create multiple pins and test them out to see which is the most popular.
So there are the five essential elements of how to create a viral pin.
If you’re looking for more help with your Pinterest account, so that you can have more traffic on your blog, I recommend Becca Klein’s Pinterest Pop* course. She has a free webinar on 3 Ways to Make Pinterest Work for Your Blog as an introduction to the course with availability every day.
*This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click a link and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission. There is no extra cost to you for this.
