How to Use Pinterest For Photographers: Marketing Steps for Photography Business

Promoting your photos (as a photographer) on social media platforms can be quite challenging. But if you want a place where you can reach your target audience who are active users and always on a search for beautiful photos, then Pinterest is the place for you.

Pinterest is a visual search engine. And this itself tells you that Pinterest should be a great place to promote a photography business. People love sharing beautiful images, landscapes, unique unusual photos, and so on. So it’s true that great photos can get a ton of repins on Pinterest. In this post, I will give you a list of actionable steps that can help you grow your photography business on Pinterest. 

I hope I did answer your question whether or not you should use Pinterest for your photography business 🙂 It’s true that Pinterest for photographers is one of the best platforms to get a qualified audience and leads.

How do you use and optimize your Pinterest account to actually get clients to your photography business?

 

This post today will be helpful not only if you are a photographer looking for clients, but also for several other types of businesses inside the photography niche. For example, if you share photography tips or sell photography educational content, I will show you some really good examples of how people promote them on Pinterest. 

Also, if you are offering Pinterest management services to clients who run a photography business, this video will also help you learn the best practices that work for this particular niche.

As a side note, if you’d like to learn more about Pinterest marketing, check out my Free Pinterest Masterclass or join my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. I also have here a list of the most recent Pinterest updates and changes. 

How Do You Use Pinterest for Photographers? 

1. Step. Create a Business Pinterest Account

First and foremost, to promote your business on Pinterest, you need to have a business account and verify your site on Pinterest. If you are a complete beginner and you need to create a business account on Pinterest from scratch, I have a video tutorial that you can watch: 

2 Step. Create Pinterest Boards Relevant to Your Niche 

The second step would be analyzing your niche and building your boards on Pinterest. Again, here is one of my tutorials that will show you how to set up your account, how to create boards, and everything you need as a new account owner on Pinterest step by step. 

So I’d like to first start by showing you how you can investigate how popular is your particular type of business inside the photography niche is. When you go to Pinterest Categories, you see this page that is shown to all the new users once they first sign up on this platform. And you will see here that one of the big categories on Pinterest is Photography.

If we open it, we’ll see that this category has 92 million followers right now. And while you’re scrolling down the page, you will see here how popular the pins are on this niche.

But when you reach the bottom part of the page, you will see several subcategories or subtopics inside the photography big niche and you will see that the popular ones that we can find here – wedding photography, street photography, nature photography, animal photography.

Pinterest for Wedding Photographers

For example, for wedding photography, you will find out that it has almost 18 million followers on Pinterest and I encourage you to investigate further what kind of pins are getting so much traction on Pinterest and why, and whether or not they’re related to your niche.

Here is a Pinterest account of a wedding photographer. You will see that it is almost 1 million monthly viewers. Many people are interested in designing wedding photo books and get inspirational hints from those collections. If you look at her boards you will find out that she’s specifying the description where she’s located – in Arizona. So she’s looking for clients in this state. And then she shows some examples of her work.

And then you will see that she’s not only saving pins that are focused on wedding photography. She has some other boards that are not directly related to wedding photography. She has some family photo ideas boards and other types of photography. So that’s why I’m trying to always say that on Pinterest, it’s important to have a little bit broader field when you’re building your boards. You shouldn’t be focused or super niched down if you want to get good traction on Pinterest. 

When you’re going to discover more of these topics related to the initial photography category, you will see that in the related topics, you will find some very good ideas for the titles of your boards. For example here, we’re looking at wedding photography poses and it has about 42,000 followers on Pinterest. And when you scroll more below, you will find more ideas for your board titles from the recommended subcategories, for example, groom poses. If you’re focused on wedding photography, definitely use keywords like this for your board titles. 

Another place where you can also look for information about how bis your audience on Pinterest is through Pinterest Analytics Audience Insights inside All Pinterest Users. And then inside the categories, you will see there’s the Art category. Unfortunately, I cannot find the photography category separately but if I look inside the art category, I’ll see here that there is photography. It’s quite a popular subcategory inside art. 

I’d like to go really quickly over the basics for you to understand what you need to do step by step on your account. 

3 Step. Setup your profile

So first is to create your account. You probably need to use your profile picture that either is your photo or represents somehow what kind of photography you offer to clients. And then explain in the title of your profile if it’s important for you that you want to only get clients in your specific location. I would recommend having your location in the name of your Pinterest profile and then on the field for description. The description field a little bit longer so you can add some information about the type of photography you’re selling and you can also mention again the location if it is important for you. In this case, I like that this photographer mentions what kind or what style of photos she’s offering to her clients.

4 Step. Create Vertical Pins

My next tip would be maybe, specifically for this profile, how she could improve her presence on Pinterest is by using vertical photos or vertical images. Maybe she could even repurpose the same photos that she already has on her profile that they’re horizontal. But she could add something on top like maybe she could make a small collage of two photos and then on top of it she could add a text overlay to generate more clicks and to have taller images. Because that’s how this platform works. On Pinterest, you have to know that images have to be vertical. 80% of the audience on mobile devices. That’s how the platform works – in the vertical format. So if you have a lot of horizontal images, you’re just losing a lot of exposure on Pinterest and losing some traffic to your competitors who spend the extra time and effort on creating those vertical images. 

The recommended image ratio on Pinterest is 2:3 and the maximum height of your image can be 1:2 when it gets taller than 1:2 image ratio, Pinterest is going to cut off the bottom part of the pin and your pins will not get as much distribution because they’re too tall. The image size recommended on Pinterest is at least 1000 by 15000 pixels.

Another thing missing from this account’s pins is either her domain name or some logo of some kind because there’s no any kind of watermark on her photos and this is bad because the Pinterest platform has this particular problem of stolen pins so it’s very easy for people who want to redirect traffic from your images to their site. It’s very easy for them to steal your content and it’s harder for you to prove that it really is your content when you don’t have any kind of watermark or at least your domain name somewhere at the bottom of the pin at least.

So I mentioned that you could create those taller pins just by making a simple collage image from a few of your photos and a text overlay on top. The easiest way to create these types of pin images, and it’s a free tool, is Canva.

I know that most of the photographers are pretty comfortable with Photoshop but actually, even for professional graphic designers, I think that for these kinds of collages, because Canva has these special grids, it is actually easier to create these kinds of pins in Canva. It’s a free online tool available to everyone and I have a video tutorial about creating pins in Canva.

Here is a tutorial I have in making pins through Canva:

5 Step. Use Pinterest Scheduler to Automate Your Pinning

And then I’d like also to give you tip about how you can manage your Pinterest account without spending too much time on the platform because as a business owner as a photographer, you want to spend most of your time working with your clients and Pinterest is probably just one of the platforms you’re using to drive traffic to your website.

I would say that if you’re doing everything manually on Pinterest, you’re either doing not enough pinning because Pinterest recommends 15-25 pins a day. It’s like the average that most successful accounts are saving on the platform right now. So if you don’t have the time to save many pins on Pinterest, then you probably might want to look at the authorized Pinterest scheduler called Tailwind. It will allow you to save each of your pins to several boards relevant to the content, the keywords on your pin title, and the description of your pin.

The scheduler will help save each of your pins to several relevant boards that are actually helping you get exposure to a bigger audience on Pinterest because each of your boards might have slightly different keywords also related to the keywords that you have in the title of your pin and description of your pin, but slightly different keywords. So you’re going to show your pin to a bigger audience rather than a few saved once to just one board on your Pinterest account.

Again I have a detailed tutorial on how to use the Tailwind scheduler. If you feel that you’re spending way too much time on Pinterest and you still want to maintain the same level of activity on the platform, then check out the video:

 

Now I’m going to show you a couple of examples that are doing particularly great on Pinterest and they will be from different types of photography business. For example, this company. They are a creative photography business showing behind the scenes. They have a strong presence on Instagram and Youtube and also on Pinterest now that we’re looking at. Their account is at 6.7 million monthly viewers and what I find really interesting about this account they have just a few boards and they mostly have about video pins that I think that they are creating these video pins from the content they already have on other platforms. So if it’s your case, you can also repurpose content like they’re doing.

If I open some of these videos like what they’re doing here, they’re basically showing some tips about photography and they have a lot of engagements. Unfortunately, we cannot see the number of repins here but I can assure you that these pins are getting viral fast because they have super high engagements. 

As you can see from this example, Pinterest doesn’t have to be a hard hustle because they just uploaded here the content that they already have on other platforms. And it works great for them. Their account is doing really well. And they’re sending traffic to their Youtube videos. And also on their site, they’re selling some Lightroom presets. And from these pins, they’re sending traffic from Pinterest directly to their presets. 

And now another interesting example here is this account that is promoting some Photoshop tips and photography tips. And basically, it’s an educational site for beginner photographers. And we can see here that she’s not selling actually her own services. But she’s mostly selling educational content about the photography niche and she has a membership site for beginner photographers. If we look at her account, in particular, we’ll see here that she has 1.3 million monthly viewers on Pinterest.

She has a lot of boards in this case and her strategy is kind of different. If we look at her account, we’ll find out here that most of her pins are linked to some educational content. In this case, in particular, in her podcast episodes. And then she’s always adding some text overlay on top of the pins. 

If you look at her pins you will realize that she must use these text overlays with How To and other attractive call to action phrases that will help her get actual traffic from these pins. Otherwise, it will just be a pretty picture of a girl. And maybe some people would save it as an idea for whatever their kid photography session. But they wouldn’t have a reason to click through. Now, with this text overlay, she explains why the users need to click through and what they will learn from this article. 

And then I also found this particularly popular pin with 36 comments and when I click through, I realized that this type of photography business is very different from what I was showing to you so far. It’s a business based on photo retouching services and they are also sending a lot of traffic to their site from Pinterest. 

This is how their Pinterest account looks. They have 9 million monthly viewers. You can see their boards. It’s about 6 boards but they have a lot of pins on each of these boards. You can see that it’s over 4000. And you will realize that here they’re focusing very well on the main keyword related to their services. Retouch photos or digital retouching. I think that in their case, it’s easier to create these engaging photos because they can show before and after, and that’s what they’re doing in most photos. They basically show examples of the work and then it goes to their page. 

I hope this guide to Pinterest for photographers has helped you jumpstart your Pinterest strategies.

Here’s another tip for you: If you struggle to understand the basics of search engine optimization for Google, check this free training by Mike Pearson who has his Google SEO figured out and making over $10,000/mo with each of the two niche blogs he runs.

If you found this post useful, you might want to save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board to check the post later when new updates are announced.

Pinterest for Photographers: Pinterest Marketing for Photography Business

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Instructions

1. Step Create a Business Pinterest Account

2. Step. Create Pinterest Boards Relevant to Your Niche 

3. Step. Setup your profile

4. Step. Create Vertical Pins

5. Step. Use Pinterest Scheduler to Automate Your Pinning

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