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The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Photography on Pinterest

From someone who built up to 20K impressions per month

By Darryl BrooksPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

When thinking about marketing photography on social media, many ignore Pinterest. This is primarily because a lot of people don’t know or understand Pinterest. They believe it is a recipe sharing or wedding planning site for women or a place for do-it-yourselfers to share projects.

But it is much more than that.

What Is Pinterest and Why Should You Care?

Pinterest is a social sharing network that relies exclusively on visual content, much like Instagram. But unlike Instagram, Pinterest users, known as Pinners, post their content on boards. Think of a bulletin board where you would pin up items of interest.

Here are the stats that make Pinterest compelling as a site to market your photography.

Two hundred fifty million active users per month!

The lifespan of a pin is a week, not minutes like Twitter and Facebook.

29% of U.S. adults use Pinterest.

Pins can spread much quicker and further than posts on other platforms.

How to Get Started

This article is primarily about marketing on the platform, but if you don’t have an account, here is a quick start guide.

If you don’t already have a Pinterest account, it’s easy to get started. Just browse to Pinterest.com. But don’t click on Sign Up. You want a business account, so click on Create a business account, below. Besides establishing yourself as a business, this option will give you extra tools — the primary of which is the analytics tools.

You’ll go through a standard set of startup questions. Give each a bit of thought, but you can change your mind later. Once complete, you will want to create a profile. The first step in your marketing plan is a good profile. Keep it consistent with your other social networks. You can see by my profile that I’ve used the same image as on Medium and my other social networks.

You are only given 160 characters for your bio, so use them wisely.

Screen Capture: Pinterest.com

Pro tip:

Use a different browser to view and test your site. In other words, if you are using Chrome, open an Edge browser, and type in your Pinterest URL. This will show you a view of your site with no cookies or information specific to you. just like the public will see it. As you build your page, go back and refresh the other browser to see the results.

Best Practices on Boards

As stated above, your posts, called “Pins” on Pinterest, are divided into boards. Pinterest has a lot of information to help you get started, so go ahead and create your first board, which should probably be called “Photography” at this point. You’ll want to create at least four more boards, as Pinterest puts five featured boards at the top of your page, but hold off on that for a minute.

As you create each board, you need to give it a name. The name should reflect the category or niche of pins you plan on posting there, such as food photography, pet photography, etc. But you also want to use names that will help drive traffic to your boards. Here’s how.

Screenshot of Pinterest Boards Page

Pro tip:

There are a ton of topics that users can follow on Pinterest. If one of your boards has the same name as one of these topics, your board is included when people look at that topic. Here’s how to find the best ones.

Browse to Pinterest. The first thing you see is there are over 87M followers for that topic! That is why you named your first board “Photography”. Now scroll down past the Top 10 ideas (although you will want to come back to these later).

Under those, you will see Related Topics. These are the names you want to use. If you click on them, just as above, you will see the number of followers. For instance, Landscape Photography has 12.4M followers. This doesn’t mean that your Landscape Photography board will be viewed by 12M people. But it gives you that much exposure, which is so much better than, say, My Landscape Photography.

You can use this same process to find and name your first five boards. Don’t go crazy creating a lot of boards in the beginning. You can always add more later.

Screen Shot for Editing Boards

Pro tip:

One last tip on boards. If you click on the Edit pencil on any board, you see an option for Protected Board. Check this to keep it private. This will make it invisible to other people on Pinterest. Hidden boards are a great place to keep pins you are researching or pins that you are working on, but may not be ready for prime time.

Best Practice on Pins

Pins on Pinterest are graphical, just like Instagram. And like other social networks, there is a preferred size, which is 735 x 1102 pixels. As you can see, Pinterest pins should be vertical — always. This is because most people view Pinterest on mobile devices. The pin size doesn’t have to be exact; just keep about a 2:3 aspect ratio.

There are four components to a Pinterest pin, and all of them are important to your marketing. The only one that is required is the image. The next two are the title and description. Here is where you need to put some thought into the content. Make them relevant and use good SEO practices to drive both Pinterest users and search engines to your pins. Some say that hashtags aren’t as beneficial on Pinterest, and while this may be true internally, they certainly won’t hurt your chances with search engines.

Finally, there is a destination link. Always, always, always, use a destination link, because, why not? After all, the whole purpose of this is marketing your site. If this image is for sale somewhere, link back to it. If the pin is more generic or informational, just include a link to your website or blog.

Screen Shot of Fine Art America Pin on Pinterest

Many image-hosting or POD sites have built-in links to post your content directly to Pinterest. This will create a ready-made pin with ready to post.

Like other social networks, you can upload any type of image. Fill your boards with only your best photography. But you also want to incorporate images that include text. These types of images will draw the viewer’s eye and generate more traffic. But don’t fill your boards with just these type images as that just looks spammy.

Pro tip:

Actually, two this time. Fine Art America can now create a pin with text for you. They made it for Instagram, but it works well here also.

Screen Shot of Text Based Pin from Fine Art America

If you want to make your own images with text and hate wrestling with text boxes in Photoshop, Canva.com has hundreds of free templates — some optimized for Pinterest that are easy to build on. I built the featured image for this article there.

The Rest of the Story

Correctly naming boards and creating pins is the majority of the work on Pinterest, but like all social media, there are tricks and tips to increase traffic.

As with most social media, the most effective way to grow your audience is by engaging with them. Click and comment on other pins, especially within your niche. You can, and should, pin other people’s pins to your boards. This is similar to retweeting, and similarly, it can help you ride the coattails of influencers.

Screen Shot of Pin Sharing on Pinterest

Speaking of influencers, follow as many in your niche as possible. Follow their boards, repin their pins, and start conversations with them on their boards.

Again, this isn’t unique to Pinterest, but post frequently. The experts claim you should post between 5 and 30 pins a day. That’s fine if you can maintain that pace, but I would recommend keeping a schedule you can manage. Consistency is more important than volume. And quality trumps all.

Pro tip:

Timing is much-touted among social media gurus, but I’ve never put much stock in it. Trying to pin at 2:42 on a Tuesday because that’s supposed to be the “best time” is silly. But, you can, and should, spread your pin timing out across the calendar. And this means re-pinning. After your pin has been up for a day or two, go back and repin it to another board. This will crank the momentum up again and expose it to a whole new audience.

For instance, if you post an image of flowers in a Japanese garden to your nature photography board, you can repin that to your main photography board and your travel photography board. That is potentially three different audiences.

Screen Shot of Pin Sharing on Pinterest

Analytics

The final piece of the puzzle is your analytics, the main benefit of a business account. This page will show your hits over time, as well as impressions on your top boards and pins. You can also view other stats, which can show the type of engagement your pins generated. Link clicks are very useful to see how much traffic your pin generated back to your site or product.

I stated earlier that pins have a lifetime of a week, but my top two pins came from a blog I created seven years ago and still generate impressions today.

Pinterest Screen Shot

This pin, which I created from an image of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, continues to get me the most traction today. It has a compelling image and a good description. But the main point is other pinners save it on their Seattle boards. So it is not only seen and clickable by my followers but also all of theirs.

Pro tip:

When you click on an image from the analytics page, there is a link at the top to See More Stats. This can give you a detailed insight into who is following and repinning your image.

Pinterest is the fourth largest social media site in the world and is growing daily. The fact that it lends itself so well to a visual medium like photography makes it the perfect marketing platform.

If you aren’t on Pinterest yet, you need to be.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider dropping me a tip below. Thanks for reading.

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About the Creator

Darryl Brooks

I am a writer with over 16 years of experience and hundreds of articles. I write about photography, productivity, life skills, money management and much more.

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