7 Noteworthy Pinterest Features You Don’t Want to Miss

Keeping up with the latest happenings on social media isn’t an easy feat.

That’s why I recently sat down with Alisa Meredith, content marketing manager at Tailwind, to sort through what’s happening these days on Pinterest.

Some of the topics we covered included:

• New Pinterest analytics and insights
• Creating and scheduling pins right from within Pinterest
• Uploading multiple pins at once
• Using affiliate links on Pinterest

And much more.

Audience Insights

As Alisa noted, Audience Insights has been around for a bit – but is so important it’s worth talking about. It provides a wealth of info on your audience, and saves you from having to wonder what’s popular on Pinterest.

For instance, you might find that your top category is home décor, and that 71% of the total Pinterest audience is interested in décor. But you might be wondering: what type of décor? The nice thing is you can really drill down – for instance, home accessories, home accents, room décor, etc.

Then you can drill down into demographics – for instance 70% women, 30% men. You can see age distribution, which location users are coming from, devices used…it’s all there.         

You can also see how your audience compares to the typical or total Pinterest audience. For instance, what is my audience more interested in than the average user? This will help me plan what type of pins I want to share.

I asked Alisa how often she recommends looking at your Audience Insights – Once a week? Once a month? She recommended starting today. Then the next time you do content planning, you can go in and see if there’s anything you hadn’t thought about. You can also grab some keywords from there that you might want to use in your pin descriptions…or even in your blog posts.

Alisa also noted how easy it is to separate out the info you need in Audience Insights. For instance, you can now go into claimed accounts, choose your website, and see analytics for pins just from your website. You can also do this with your Instagram pins, YouTube pins, or whichever channels you’ve claimed. She finds this really useful for seeing the difference between what she’s pinned and what other people have pinned.

You can also filter results by device (e.g., Which devices are getting the most traffic?), link clicks, saves, engagement rates, and even promoted or organic pins. This is great for taking your promoted pins out of the equation so you can see what’s actually happening in terms of organic activity.

To sum this one up: I recommend taking a really deep dive into all these new Insight options. Don’t just click around – take notes. Really ask questions about what your audience is pinning, the devices they’re using, and then guesstimate the best type of content you could be putting out there.

Design a pin in Pinterest

This is a new feature that just kind of appeared recently. I don’t use it much but I do think it’s a great feature.

According to Alisa, this feature makes sense given Pinterest’s focus on fresh content: Pinterest is rewarding new content with distribution, and this, of course, is how you get clicks. 

She finds this feature to be a simple way to remix existing images – to crop them, rotate them, change colors, add text overlay, etc. Text overlay is important both for adding context to your pins in people’s feeds, and also for giving Pinterest context as they do read text on your images. I’ll cover this in more detail below.

To use the feature, simply click on the little pencil icon after you upload an image, and it will give you all the options mentioned above for editing your image.

Upload multiple pins on one screen

To use this feature, simply go in to create your pin, and hit the little icon with the plus in it (on desktop it’s on the left side of your screen). This will let you upload multiple images, links, titles and descriptions all on the same screen.

Alisa suggests using this feature to test different images with the same title, description and link, to see which one does best. You can just copy them right on the same page, select your boards, and then publish or schedule for later. Which brings me to…

Publish at a later date

Alisa let us know that the option to “Publish at a later date” is now available when you go to create your pin. This feature lets you plan and schedule out your content for up to two weeks into the future.

You can find your scheduled pins in a scheduled tab on your profile.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to go back and see what you’ve scheduled or to edit your scheduled pins…but you can delete them.  

Personally, I think it would get a bit overwhelming doing your scheduling this way, rather than just using Tailwind.

Kimberly, one of our viewers had a question about scheduling videos on Tailwind. She noticed that her video pins were actually screenshots (not videos), and was wondering if she was doing something wrong.

Unfortunately, this is just the way it works right now. There are actually no official partner programs that offer the ability to schedule video pins, because this would actually go against Pinterest’s terms of use.

So, your best bet for now is to go into Pinterest and use their native scheduler for your video pins.

New affiliate link rules?

Unfortunately, Amazon.com still doesn’t allow affiliate links on Pinterest

A question Alisa gets asked frequently is whether you can use affiliate links on Pinterest. Pinterest does, in fact, allow affiliate links.

However, it’s actually up to each individual affiliate provider if they allow their links on the platform. For instance, Amazon in the US currently doesn’t allow affiliate links on Pinterest, while Amazon in Canada does.

What many people do as a workaround for this is to link to a blog post, then have their affiliate links in the blog post. Alisa finds this to be a more effective strategy anyway, so this is the one she would generally recommend.

1:2.1 image truncation (“giraffe pins”)

Optimal image dimensions in 2019 according to Pinterest

This relates to those really tall, “giraffe pins”, which actually tend to perform really well. About a year ago, Pinterest came out and said they were going to start truncating them – meaning cutting them off in certain parts of feeds.

According to Alisa’s ad rep, these will soon start being truncated at a 1:2.1 ratio, which means 500 to 1,100 would be the max size you’d want to go.

As always, it’s best practice to stick with the ratio Pinterest recommends, which is 2:3. You can find the specific sizes based on this aspect ratio in the chart above.

Images with text overlay

Is it better to have text overlay…or can you go without? Image via Chic Wish

The last issue I wanted to touch on with Alisa was the question of images with text overlay: Do they perform better than images without? What are some best practices for using text overlay?

According to Alisa, there are some pins that do well without text overlay. These include cocktail recipes – as we mentioned before – as well as food and fashion pins.

But text definitely gives pins an advantage when people are scrolling through their feed, because people aren’t going to get much from those tiny descriptions.

Keep in mind that Pinterest also now reads the text on your images. So adding text overlay also gives you a chance to help Pinterest learn what your pin is all about.

We also talked about best practices for your text overlays. These include:

• Don’t use scripty, handwritten fonts on your pins. While pretty, they can be hard to read on mobile, and may be more difficult for Pinterest to read.
• Make sure you have enough contrast between your background image and your text.
• Keep your users in mind. According to Alisa’s ad rep, iPhone users tend to prefer aspirational, inspirational text, while Android users tend to respond best to more practical messaging like features.
• Use calls to action on your pins. But, the key is to keep it really subtle. Alisa found really obvious CTA’s (like a “get it now” link on a bar across the bottom) performed horribly.

Kristen, Alisa and I covered a lot of ground in this Facebook Live. We also answered a whole bunch of awesome reader questions, so if you want to hear those Q&A’s, you can watch the full Live here:

And if you’re interested in learning more about Pinterest features and best practices, check out this interview I did with Cara Chance, Pinterest marketing strategist for Online Entrepreneurs: Pinterest for Business with Cara Chance.

Have questions about any of the features above? Let me know in the comments below.