How to Post on Pinterest: How to Create Pins that Go Viral

If you are a complete beginner, you need to understand the basics of how saving pins on Pinterest works.

So, this how an established Pinterest account looks – it’s a collection of boards. And every board is a collection of pins (images) grouped based on the same topic. If you need to learn how to create a Pinterest board, I covered it here.

Not all images or pins on Pinterest are linked to some external source of the image. But most of them are because people save these images from some blogs or websites they found on the Internet.

You can consider Pinterest a bookmarking site in this sense because it allows you save your favorite articles in a visual form with a link to the site you want to re-visit later.

And boards just make it so much easier to find those ideas you saved for later because every board is dedicated to a specific topic.

I hope that you now have a better idea of how things are organized on Pinterest, and I was talking so far mostly about Pinterest from the position of a regular user, a consumer of content.

Now, if you are a Pinterest marketer like I am, if you are a website owner and you want to drive free traffic from Pinterest, then you need to look into a lot more details about the best types of images which can go viral on Pinterest. And you need to know the principles behind a perfect pin design that helps your pins get a lot of saves, likes and essentially, a lot of click-throughs.

Yes, one of the most important questions in today’s video is how to make your pins click-worthy so that these beautiful images on Pinterest can convert into traffic, leads and sales for your website.

So, let’s dive into it!

And the first thing I want to talk about is pin design.

Most importantly, your images MUST be vertical! About 80% of the users browse Pinterest boards on mobile devices, which is why Pinterest prefers images with an aspect ratio 2:3.

The recommended Pinterest pin size is at least 1000*1500 pixels for the best resolution on any device. That’s a dimention of 2:3 ratio. 

In the most recent Pinterest’s official guide, they even mentioned as a recommended pin size 1000*1500 pixels. Which I think reflects technological development – most of the mobile devices nowadays come with screens of high resolution. Which means your smaller images might look pixelated on them. So, I expect that in the near future most of the content creators will start using pins of least a 1000 pixels in width.

As for the recommended image ratio, you can go as long as 1:2 ratio, anything longer than this will be cut off on Pinterest. And keep in mind that very tall pins are also getting lower distribution.

In my experience, images of 1:2 ratio work better, probably because they still occupy more space in the feed than 2:3 images. Also, maybe they stand out because most of the people are using 2:3 ratio nowadays.

Let me know in the comments below, which image ratio performs better on your account?

Colors and Types of Images that Get More Engagement on Pins

Now let’s have a look at the best color schemes and understand which are the types of Images that Get More Engagement

These tips are based on the research made by Curalate. They made a research based on the analysis of 30 different visual characteristics (for example, colors, sizes, textures, the presence of faces, etc.) with an impressive sample of 500k images on Pinterest!

And the most significant Pinterest Image Tips based on the results of this examination include:

• Images that are too dark receive 20 times less repins than images with medium brightness.

• The next tip is about colors. Your image should include at least a few vibrant colors. We are talking here about yellow, pink, red, etc. Based on their study, images with red and pink tones get on average twice more repins than images with blue tones.

• The next thing is the quality of your image. Images of low resolution not only look bad on a user’s screen, but Pinterest can also recognize the quality of the image and reduce the distribution of low-quality images. That was based on the research. But I’d like to add a few tips based on my experience on Pinterest.
• Don’t use script fonts in your text overlay for the pins. Actually, any font that is hard to read shouldn’t be used for pin images. Because you have less than a second to grab the user’s attention while they are scrolling down the feed. Users will not bother to read and understand what your pin is about when there are so many other pins next to yours which were better designed.

• Another mistake I often see with pin text overlay is trying to add a lot of text to the image. When you have too much text on a small space, what happens is that you are forced to use a small font. And that makes your text impossible to read. Always test your pins on a mobile device to see how your text overlay looks on a small screen. 80% of Pinterest users are on mobile devices and you can’t ignore this when you create your pin design.

And now I want to answer the most important question of this article. 

How to create pins that are not only going viral on the platform itself but also can generate a ton of organic traffic to your website?

In other words, how should you design your pins to increase the click-through rate to your site?

You can see the number of clicks from your pins in pin stats on Pinterest, or in your Google Analytics.

But how can you convince and intrigue users to click-through?

1. The first thing you need to know is that text overlays significantly increase click-through rates. Even if you are posting a recipe pin, you still should add a text overlay to make it clear what kind of food is on the image – is it a healthy meal? Is it suitable for any popular diet? Does it have a short preparation time? The text overlay can explain better what is on your image and can promise users solutions to their problems.

2. But text overlay can be done completely wrong and decrease the click-through. This happens when you are trying to give it all away in the pin image. Infographics often get a lot of shares and saves but not click-throughs specifically for this reason. If people get all they needed on the pin image, why would they click to your website? You have to give them a reason for this click – give them 5 out of 10 tips and make it clear that they’ll find the rest on your site.

3. Now, if you are driving traffic to a product, I recommend creating pins which show your products in a lifestyle image, not just a product on a white background. People will engage better with lifestyle pins, they will share them and click through better as well. On a product pin with a white background, the commercial side of the pin is too obvious and this may decrease your click-through rates.

Now that you know how to design pins the right way, let me also show you how to properly save your pins on Pinterest.

Pinterest offers several ways of saving pins linked to your website.

1. The first way is used when you uploaded the pin image to your page or blog post. Then you use the Pinterest Chrome extension or the social sharing button you have on your site and save the pin from your site.

2. The second way is for situations when you don’t want to have the pin image on your site (even though I recommend to have it visible in case your users would like to save it). If you don’t have the pin image on your blog post, how would your readers know if they might like your pin and might want to save it.

This second way you can use when you’ve created a second version of your pin, and you don’t want to update the pin on the site. You just want to have a fresh pin for an old page. So what you do in this case, is upload the image directly on Pinterest.

Did you find this post useful? Save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board for later!

How to Post on Pinterest: How to Create Pins that Go Viral

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1. Colors and Types of Images that Get More Engagement on Pins
2. How to create pins that are not only going viral on the platform itself but also can generate a ton of organic traffic to your website?

Anastasia Blogger

I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.

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