You wanna' know the key secret to Pinterest success? Well, maybe not the key secret, but a critical element nonetheless, and one many businesses overlook.
Pins with taller vertical aspect ratios perform better than horizontal Pins.
Why is that? Take a look at this screenshot:
Which Pins stand out the most?
And that impact is even more prominent on mobile - which you need to take into account considering 80% of Pinterest's traffic comes via mobile device.
Definitely, taking the extra time to create taller, Pinterest-specific images will improve your on-platform performance - but it does take additional time, you need to compose new images to meet that Pinterest's optimal requirements (Pinterest's ideal vertical aspect ratio is 1:2.8).
To help with this, Pinterest recently released a quick guide on how to create better Pins by re-purposing content from other networks.
Using the example of von Holzhausen, an LA-based business that sells minimalist luxury accessories, Pinterest helped create a Promoted Pin campaign by utilizing existing their image assets.
Pinterest's team created this Pin, using Canva to put the content together and add a simple text overlay.
They then ran two Promoted Pin campaigns, one with the above image, and another using this more basic, single photo taken from Von Holzhausen's website.
The result:
"After running the campaign for two weeks, we saw that the multi-product Pin with text overlay had 7x more engagement than the Pin with a single product."
Using this as a guide, Pinterest recommends the following best practices when looking to re-purpose your existing image assets as Pins.
- Create a Pin by stacking two Instagram images on top of one another and adding a simple text overlay adding context to the image
- Crop horizontal email, website or print image assets to create a Pin
- Reuse Facebook ad images by cropping them to create a vertical Pin image
- Use Photoshop to create multi-product Pins or add text overlays to your Pins. You can also use easy-to-use online image editing tools such as Canva or PicMonkey.
Once you've created your Pin image, upload it, then edit to link back to your website.
It's a fairly simple outline, but as noted, it's an important one, considering the comparative effectiveness of taller Pins - and worth consideration either way.