5 Strategies to Make Effective Pinterest Content Super Quickly

5 Strategies to Make Effective Pinterest Content Super Quickly

Creating brilliant content for social media - especially for multiple platforms - can be a real time sink. I'm a big advocate for re-purposing content to save time and conserve energy for other tasks. After all, why put all that effort in and not make the most out of what you create.

In a recent blog, Pinterest revealed several strategies for re-purposing images from other social networks to turn them into content perfect for your Pinterest feed - the type of visuals proven to perform better on the platform - specifically, vertical format images. Below, I've picked out some of these ideas (along with a few of my own) and mocked up examples to show you how they could work in the real world.

They're simple, quick, and effective, so let's take a look.

1. Crop a Facebook ad image

Facebook ad images are, with nothing more than a quick crop, can be transformed into ideal content for Pinterest. In this example, you can see a Facebook image by Mahabis alongside a cropped version that would work just as nicely as a narrow Pinterest pin. Add in the logo, et voila.

2. Stack multiple Instagram images

Oftentimes, brands will post multiple Instagram images linked by a theme. In the case of Omega below, it shared several images to show off its product links to the Olympic Games in Rio, along with brand ambassadors. In the second image, I have stacked four of these images to create a post that would work great on Pinterest, turning four squares into one large collage.

Where pertinent, use a tool like Photoshop or Canva to add a text overlay. In an A/B test by Pinterest, a multi-product Pin with text overlay had 7 times more engagement than a Pin with a single product.

3. Re-purpose a website or email newsletter banner

Website banners and email header images can be a great source of quick Pinterest content, with a little bit of editing magic. Take the first image below,  a banner from Ray-Ban's website advertising four steps to buying custom shades. By chopping the image up and stacking the elements together - as seen in the second image below - I created a new piece of content that is perfect for Pinterest.

4. Share Twitter Testimonials

Typically, Pinterest isn't the first place where your customers will go to rave about their experience with your product or service, but if you do receive high praise (such as on Twitter), why not gather a few of the testimonials together and use them in one single Pinterest post? In the example below, I have stacked three separate testimonials for the restaurant, Nando's. With a bit of branding and a clever caption, this kind of social proof can be just as powerful as any carefully-crafted ad image.

5. Dont' forget GIFs

Despite the explosion in popularity of GIFs on social media, they make up only a small proportion of content on Pinterest. Whether it's a GIF you have made specially for another platform, or if you re-purpose a video down into a few of its most engaging seconds, a nice GIF can really help your brand stand out on Pinterest. Make an eye-catching loop, demo a product, etc.

Over to you

What strategies do you use to re-purpose content for Pinterest? Will you be making use of any of the ideas above? Let me know in the comments below!

What Every Business MUST Do to Prepare for Pinterest's Guided Search

What Every Business MUST Do to Prepare for Pinterest's Guided Search

What is Pinterest Guided Search?

Pinterest Guided Search was rolled out to the site in April 2014 (mobile app first, desktop soon after) as a way to shake-up how search engines work. Pinterest says Guided Search is "made for exploring, whether you know exactly what you want, or you’re just starting to look around. "  By offering broad suggestions as you search - and letting you add your own into the mix - the hope is that users will find what they are looking for more easily, whether that thing was in their mind from the beginning or whether suggestions inspired them to a choice along the way.

How does Pinterest Guided Search work?

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Say your initial Pinterest search was for one of the things above. In this case, I chose Mens Style.

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Upon the results being returned, Pinterest automatically suggests relevant suggestions to help me narrow my search down, e.g. clothes for Summer or Fall.

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

By tapping the "+" button, you are able to add in your own suggestions to help narrow your search results down as you wish, e.g. "blue" to filter the clothes by colour.

What does Pinterest Guided Search mean for my business?

First off, Pinterest has said that Guided Search will not affect search rankings, so your current pins are unaffected. However, what its introduction does do is give brands an even bigger incentive to make sure that their pins' descriptions are optimised for SEO. This means including specific, relevant keywords to help highlight the most distinctive elements of your pins in order to give them the best chance of being discovered.

Conclusion

Will the introduction of Guided Search spark a change in the way you publish content on Pinterest? Do you welcome the new feature? Let me know in the comments below!

5 Ways to Make Pinterest Images That Get More Repins, Likes, and Comments

What is the world's most perfect Pinterest pin? 

For over a year, boffins at Curalate in Philadelphia studied millions of Pinterest photos and their engagement levels to try to figure out what makes the perfect Pinterest image. The answer combines a number of characteristics, exemplified by the image above: "Aunt Peggy's Cucumber, Tomato, and Onion Salad" by cooking show host, Paula Deen. At the time of writing, it has been repinned over 300,000 times, liked over 8,000 times, and commented by over 300 people.

What elements make up the perfect Pinterest pin? 

Amongst the most popular images on Pinterest and Instagram, Curalate found that they all shared the following characteristics. Take a look, and work at feeding them into your own stream to encourae more engagement from your customers:

Portrait layout

Source: 

http://pinterest.com/pin/162059286562405620/

 Images for Pinterest that are taken in a vertical orientation (with an aspect ratio between 2:3 and 4:5) perform better than those snapped in landscape. This is because Pinterest displays all photos in a vertical orientation, making those uploaded in other ratios look squashed and small.

Unobtrusive backgrounds

Source: 

http://pinterest.com/pin/36310340717096776/

Curalate found that product images taken against a plain, artificial background - specifically if the background makes up more than 40 per cent of the total image area - see their amount of repins halves or even quartered compared to others. Instead, the best-performing pins use a minimal background that still provides compelling context.

No human faces

Source: 

http://pinterest.com/pin/374080312768342774/

Somewhat surprisingly - as marketers often feel that people connect with images of other humans - images without faces get repinned more than those that have them. Curalate surmises that this is that while Facebook, for example, is the social network of people, Pinterest is the social network of things. And on a network of things, people's faces only serve as a distraction.

Multiple colours and lots of red

Source: 

http://pinterest.com/pin/492440540475715870/

Pinterest pins with multiple dominant colors garner more than three times the replies as images with just one, it was found. In addition, images that were made up predominantly of red or orange images were found to get twice the repins as predominantly blue images.

Moderate light

Source: 

http://pinterest.com/pin/11259067789676883/

Very light and very dark images are, on average, repinned one-twentieth as often as images with medium lightness.

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