By Bardi Toto
Xceptional Marketing Solutions recently surveyed 110 of the most followed Pinterest pinners to get a better understanding of their habits and preferences. We asked these influencers what advice they would give merchants who want to optimize their images for Pinterest. Specifically, we wanted to learn what they would tell merchants to do or not do in order to make them more likely to pin from you, and to get the most repins and traction on Pinterest. When these power pinners offer advice on how to best optimize your website product images to make them go viral on the social media site, retailers might want to take note. Here are the three tips.
1) Show your product in a real life setting.
When it comes to products, 68.4 percent of top pinners agree that merchandise displayed in lifestyle/editorial image get repinned more often than items on a plain white background. This means that if you sell vases, show not just the vase “but a vase in a room on a table,” advises a pinner with 1.6+ million followers. If you sell clothing, do not show just “an empty shirt, but a shirt on a girl down the street, looking great.” This philosophy is no different than that of selling a house. While it may look nice enough on its own, it looks a lot better with some gorgeous staging.
More than a few pinners were also quick to point out that simple product shots, as opposed to lifestyle images, look too much like, well… marketing. A pinner with more than 3.8 million followers says, “Merchandise on plain backgrounds are great, but I find that it looks too much like you are selling the product.”
2) Vertical images are better than horizontal images … way better.
Virtually no top pinner prefers wide images to long images, and the reason is simple: Pinterest’s layout restricts the size of its rows, but not the columns. This means that horizontal images pin smaller than vertical ones, and larger images almost always look better on the boards.
Brands should “optimize width/height for about a 1:3 ratio,” which has the highest impact and the most visibility. “Sometimes I see gorgeous images that are shot horizontally, and I do not pin them because I know they will show up really small on my board,” says a pinner with 850,000+ followers. “Pinterest is visual. People repin what catches their eye. Small images do not catch people’s eyes.”
3) Avoid images with marketing copy like logos, price tags and watermarks.
Brands need to keep a no-pressure, un-salesy mentality in mind when pinning. This means refraining from price tags, captions that sound like ads or obvious branding such as watermarks/logos. One great pinned image without logos is better than four mediocre images with marketing copy, both for your brand and your following.”
In addition to salesy copy, price tags are a no-go for most pinners. “Big price tags make pins look too much like marketing material.” Another influencer with more than 550,000 followers sums it up simply, and uses the dreaded s-word in the process: “Images with logos, marketing messages, etc. look like spam.”