Are you using Pinterest for business? If you are, then it’s important to know what works and why! I have been using Pinterest for about 5 years now personally. You know, party planning, recipes, crafts I wish I had the time for 🙂 It was only
recently that I started using Pinterest as another method to put my business out there. To say I was at a bit of a loss is an understatement. I was so used to finding pins and pinning what I liked that I didn’t know what to do. I was never the originator of a pin.
At first, I didn’t think much of it. I just pinned whenever I had the opportunity. My etsy listings, creative market listings, blog posts etc. What I didn’t realize, was there are some important elements that go into creating a successful pin. According to Pinterest, a successful pin has three things, a vertical image, long descriptions, and a positive message.
Now, let’s talk about what resonated with me, the vertical image of course. As I was pinning directly from item listings, for the most part my pins were horizontal. I wasn’t crazy about how they looked, but I wasn’t really sure why. As explained in the link above, Pinterest works on a vertical grid. Vertical images just work better with the flow of the layout. Add the increased use of cell phones (for everything!) these days, vertical is more natural to the screens we spend so much time on.
How did I change what I do? I now always add at least one vertical image to my blog posts. I still pin directly from my shops of course, I need to, but I try to balance it more with a corresponding blog post. My vertical image pins not only look better to me, but I can see they get much more traction than the pins from my shops.
How can you implement this technique you ask? The first way would be to style your own, shoot, edit, and crop the image to fit Pinterst. The second way would be to save yourself the hassle and use styled stock images! Little by little I’m increasing the number of vertical images I offer on Etsy. These will come to Creative Market soon too. The beauty of my styled stock photos though is that your purchase is for high resolution (aside from web-optimized Instagram collections) images. This means you can crop them any way you want and maintain a high quality image. If you love the image here, you may be surprised to know this is actually from a horizontal photo! You can find the original image here to get a sense of how I selectively cropped for a great pinnable photo! Browse around and see what you come up with. I always find it fun to see how I can break up a photo and get different uses out of it.
Happy Pinning 😉
Such a good idea! I love this image, and that’s so awesome that your stock images are so versatile!!
Thank you Jenna!
Yes! I have read that people spend more time looking at the vertical Pinterest images because they are actually on the screen for a longer period time as people scroll up on their mobile device.