Pinterest Best Practices: How Often and What to Pin To Grow Your Traffic in 2022

Pinterest is a great tool to add to your marketing arsenal. Unlike most other social media websites, Pinterest is designed in such a way that people can easily click out to your blog or e-commerce store. While most marketers in today's day and age are focusing on Instagram and Facebook to drive conversions, Pinterest has grown into a powerful platform with a giant and loyal viewer base. In their most recent (at the time of writing) letter to shareholders, they have shown a year-on-year increase of 37% in their customer base, with monthly active users has reached 459 million!

There's plenty of ambiguity around what makes a pin go viral and how often you should pin to see more traffic on Pinterest. This is why we are going to be unpacking some of the resources provided by Pinterest to figure out exactly what makes some pins stand out over others.

Pinterest Approved Best Practices For Creating Beautiful Pins

Pinterest itself has extensive guidelines on how you can make your pins stand out by following some best practices. There are so many different types of pins you can create, and they come with their own creative guidelines.

At the most basic level, each pin can include an image or a video, along with a link to your online shop or blog. If viewers find your pin interesting, they can click out of Pinterest to visit your website. Currently, Pinterest supports three kinds of pin formats: images, videos and ideas.

Best Practices for Pinterest Pins with Images

Pinterest is a visual search engine. Naturally, the best-performing pins are usually the ones that are aesthetically pleasing to look at and have a narrative that makes people want to click on them to know more. For standard image pins, Pinterest has the following recommendations.

Vertical images: Vertical Images just perform better than horizontal ones! Pinterest recommends that you keep your aspect ratio at 2:3. This means that if your pin is 2000px wide, it should be 3000px in height. These ratios are considered the best for performance and to ensure that your pins don't get truncated.
Avoid using stock photos that don't serve a purpose: You want your viewers to be attracted to what you have to say, and they won't be able to understand what you truly represent if you're just using meaningless stock photos on your pins. Make sure the images you choose have a purpose and meaning.
Brand your pins: Your pins should always have the logo of your brand or website on them. These don't have to be overpowering, but present enough that your viewers can identify your logo if they see it on your pins over and over again. This will help raise awareness and create brand loyalty. Pinterest puts its own logo at the bottom right corner of the pins, so avoid that region as it will be hidden on the platform.
Add text to your pin: Add text overlay to your pin to make them a bit more appealing. Write your copy in a way that attracts the users to know a little bit more about what you are trying to convey with your pin. Pinterest is full of all kinds of visually appealing content, so you will have to make that extra effort in your copy to make it truly stand out.
Optimise for Pinterest SEO: Descriptions and titles play a huge role in helping the Pinterest algorithm identify exactly what it is that you're trying to convey through your pins. Make sure you do your keyword research to figure out exactly what it is that people are searching within your niche, and then include those keywords in your description and titles. Adding relevant hashtags under your description will also help your pins rank higher.
Don't forget your link: Once you have the perfect pin in place, be sure to add the correct and relevant link to your pin. If your website is laggy and full of spam, Pinterest will make a note of that and count it as a violation which will make your ranking suffer, so make sure that you have a great website and the content you are pointing to with your link is relevant to the pin you have created.

Best Practices for Pinterest Video Pins

After the popularity of TikTok and the advent of reels on Instagram, Pinterest is the next big social media platform that is pushing video content.

First Impressions Count: Users are continuously scrolling through their Pinterest grid to find the next big idea. They will not waste their time on a long video pin that does not catch their attention. Make sure that you create compelling content from the get-go. This will help you grab your viewer's attention in the first couple of seconds which will mean that they will be more likely to stick around to see what you have to offer (thus making it more likely for them to click out!).
Choose a length that delivers your message: The length of your pin will depend on several factors. If your pin has some kind of informational content or a tutorial, it would make sense to have a longer video (up to a minute). Pinterest has different guidelines for organic pins v/s pins that have been made specifically for ads.
Use cover images & focus on copy to improve SEO: Once you've created and uploaded your video pin, you should use a cover photo with some text that talks about what your video pin is about. If they know exactly what it is they're signing up for, they're far less likely to keep scrolling down. To further optimise for search, write clear and relevant titles and descriptions that have keywords which you would like your pin to be searchable.
Rely on visuals over audio: Instead of talking your viewers through whatever it is your pin is trying to relay, overlay text and captions on your pin. This will help your SEO, but also make sure that your viewers get the point of your message without scrolling away, as a lot of them will have their audio turned off.

When And How Often You Should Post On Pinterest

When posting on Pinterest, it is important to have a consistent schedule. You need to post often so that your pins are constantly ranked at the top within your chosen niche. More important than the number of posts is the quality. If you're going to post the same thing 20 times a day without optimising for SEO or without using appealing visuals, your pins will not be able to perform. Pinterest has also been placing a lot of emphasis on creating fresh pins. This means that you need to have pins that have fresh images and content, otherwise they might be considered spam.

Our Complete Pinterest Posting Strategy

Generally, the number of pins you post in a day will depend on the number of posts or products you have on your website. You want to present your viewers and followers with new and varied content and not just the same pins over and over again. There are a couple of things to keep in mind as a posting strategy.

Multiple pins for the same post: Initially, make at least three of four different pins for the same post or website.
Cycle through content: Once you have at least fifty to sixty posts or different products on your website, you should cycle through these and post fresh pins on Pinterest. You will want to create a new pin each time you want to publish an old link.
Post up to 20 pins a day: You should be posting every day, but this will vary depending on the amount of content you have on your website. For example, if you have 30 products or blog posts that you want to promote, you can make two new fresh pins every month and post twice a day. This way you will cover all your content twice within the span of a month. This number will obviously go up as you write more posts or have more things to promote, but the most important thing to remember is - consistency is key. You also don't want to spam your reader with too much of the same content so make sure you diversify your content each day.
Use a scheduler: Schedulers are going to be a key factor in helping you become more consistent. There are plenty of third party options, one of the most popular ones being Tailwind. Tailwind comes with plenty of other features that can help you drive more traffic via Pinterest which we will get into more detail later! You can also use Pinterest's in-built scheduler to schedule your posts.
Follow the 80/20 rule: When pinning on Pinterest, try to follow the 80/20 rule. This means that while you can re-pin your and other people's pins 20 per cent of the time, you should pin your own fresh content 80 per cent of the time.

What Is An Optimum Number Of Pins To Post Everyday on Pinterest?

These days, Pinterest is all about high-quality Pins that are of relevance to their viewers. You need to post enticing visuals with good informational content to truly stand out from the crowd. This is why there is a great emphasis on quality over quantity. Pinterest will always prioritise new and original content over content that has been shared over and over again.

The number of pins you post per day will depend on the number of fresh content you can cycle through without appearing spammy, but the sweet spot seems to be somewhere around 15 pins per day (these are a combination of new pins and re-pins). When you are re-pinning, make sure that you visit the website your pin is pointing to. If the website is irrelevant and has spammy content, the pins might be flagged and your Pinterest performance might suffer, for no fault of your own!

At the end of the day, if your content is visually enticing, relevant and informational - and you continue to consistently add new pins and content, you will see your traffic increase over time!