We loved hearing from Hannah Beasley, a graphic designer, the importance of a strong visual brand and visual strategy for any business in order to stand out and get noticed in the marketplace. Hannah is a graphic designer who creates branding strategies for companies and brands based on their mission, vision and overall strategy instead of just pretty graphics.

You can listen to Hannah’s interview on the podcast here.

Hannah’s interview got us thinking about all the places where companies and businesses market themselves and need to have strong visual aesthetics and marketing strategy, and Pinterest stood out. Pinterest is a great visual tool to help brands market themselves to a global market. We have talked about how to use Pinterest for business in the past and wanted to take the discussion further with an emphasis on how to have a strong presence on Pinterest and how to stand out from a Pinterest expert.

You can find the Pinterest 101 refresher here.

Our friend Antonella Antonucci, a Pinterest mentor and visual curator is sharing her expertise and knowledge on how to strategically create a strong presence on Pinterest. With over 250K followers and over 2.4MM views on Pinterest, Antonella is a Pinterest recognized expert and mentor.

From Antonella,

We are all content curators. We bookmark pages, subscribe to blogs, share photos and articles on Facebook, and tweet information. We’re building our own online scrapbooks. Everyone, not just bloggers. Because living in the information age means we have to manage, organize, and share information with others. And do it efficiently!

What we know, how we manage what we know, how we share it with others, are all keys to the info-game in Pinterest.

Pinterest has recently admitted that there is no Pinterest without content creators. And that is huge. Maybe you think that Pinterest is just a place full of chocolate cakes and endless boards of wedding inspirations, but beneath its soft exterior lies the makings of a powerful content curation machine.

Building a strong presence on Pinterest requires steps.

#1 Think like a Pinner

The first and most important one is to put yourself in the shoes of a Pinner and think as a Pinner. Trying to understand how users think, what they are looking for and the user experience, in general, will help you create content and pins that will do well on Pinterest. Because people aren’t clicking through from Pinterest to read about you. They’re clicking through to find something about them and for them.

#2 Pinterest is all about quality

A pin with a high number of repins will be pushed to the top of your Pinterest Smart Feed. That is what we call a quality Pin.  This ranking feature, introduced in 2014, basically ranks all the pins that people share as best putting them on top of the Smart Feed. If your pins don’t qualify as best, they’re simply not going to be seen.

Yet, it takes more than being repinned, for a pin to be considered a quality one. One of the aspects that the algorithm analyzes and takes into consideration are the quality of the pin’s source, i.e. the website the pin is linked to. Quality sources are websites with a high number of pins created from that website’s content, that also have pins with a high number of repins a.k.a the quality of the pin.

#3 Design pinable content

So what makes an image successful on Pinterest? What makes it pinnable? 

Pinterest users like a specific shape of the image to pin. Stick with that, and you’ll do great. Pinterest recommend a 2:3 aspect ratio (e.g. 1,000 x 1,500 pixels or 600×900). Pinterest has said time and time again that other ratios could cause your Pin to truncate, or could negatively impact performance.

Of course, everyone has their own opinions on what makes a good image on Pinterest. But my piece of advice here is that you must follow your instincts with what feels good to you, and not just follow every trend that comes up on Pinterest. And carefully study your Pin performers, not the pins of everyone else.

At the moment, pinners love re-pinning close-up images of medium lightness (instead of the dark ones). Plus, images that have approx 30% of a white background or negative space are re-pinned the most. Don’t fill the frame, let your product tell the story.

It doesn’t matter if your beautiful pin is repinned 10,000 times if no one ever CLICKS on it. People are going to click on things they want to take action on or want more information about. So always keep that in mind when designing your pins AND when titling your posts.Personally, I’m not a great fan of infographic when it comes to food/fashion/interior photography but I can tell you people are busy and lazy. If there is anything about that pin that makes it hard for people to read it when they are scrolling quickly, stop right now and make a new pin. Check also how it looks on a mobile device. It’s possible the infographic looked great, readable and eye-catching on your computer, but does not look readable on your phone. 

Use bold fonts in bright colors or on lighter backgrounds. Make your text larger and no matter what, stay away from script fonts.

#4 Create your own story

You may have noticed Story Pins showing up on your Pinterest home feed – you’ll recognise them by the Story icon below the image. A story Pin can be made up of multiple pages, so you can tap into it from the home feed to get the full experience (20 pages of images, text and multiple links)

The source your pin is linking to is the essence of your marketing efforts on Pinterest. One of the biggest complains of Pinterest’s users is discovering the pin misrepresented the content. So, make sure your pin is an accurate representation of what the user can expect when they click through.

Understand also how to repin high-quality third-party pins to your own boards. This will help your own boards do better, which in turn will help your own pins in those boards to do better. It will also organically increase the number of your followers’ as they repin these third-party pins and choose to follow your boards.

#5 The quality of the pinners

When Pinterest show your content in the smart feed – whether it’s a pin you’ve created, a pin you’ve shared, or your profile or boards – they are evaluating several things.

• How many of your followers are engaging with the content you pin in terms of clicks, enlargements, re-pin and follow.
• How many people that aren’t following you are engaging with the content you pin.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what kind of secret algorithmic magic Pinterest uses to analyse these interactions, but I can tell you that all of these things are important.

Basically, if Pinterest thinks people like your things, regardless of whether it’s your content or other people’s content, they will show your profile, boards, and pins as suggestions to other users and they will make them pop in the search results more frequently. You want to be sending all kinds of signals to Pinterest that you’re a high-quality user who lots of people think is great. Make sure that you don’t pin irrelevant or broken links, meaning links leading to a website that has nothing to do with the pin itself or no website at all.So just to recap all of this and what it means to you when you are trying to build a strong presence on one of the most amazing visual search engines on the market.

• Pin content that your customer and potential customers will find interesting
• Focus on quality and not just quantity
• Pay attention to the visuals and follow the rules
• Pins and repins matter but have a strategy behind those
• Understand the analytics and tweak your strategy frequently

Think your relationship with Pinterest as dating. Only with a lot less heartbreak and chocolate.

Thank you Antonella, there is such a wealth of information here and we cannot wait to get started on implementing all these wonderful tips, strategies and tactical advice on our Pinterest account.

Antonella is a Pinterest mentor and Visual curator. She has courses and teaches creatives and entrepreneurs Pinterest strategies and helps them gain confidence in using Pinterest for their business, increase traffic to website, leverage Instagram and find a source of marketing that none of their competitors are really using well.

{Words and styling by Antonella Antonucci, Website: Pinterest Clinic, Pinterest: Pinterest Clinic, Photos by: Sarah Hemsley @aslowgathering}

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