I was recently sending one of our Pinterest Management clients an email about creating optimised images for Pinterest, and I mentioned that most of the biggest influencers don't actually pin long pins at all. I myself had a blanket ban on long or graphic pins (unless they were landing on my Typography board) as part of my mental Pinterest style sheet for years, and even now I would say that only about 10 pins in every 1,000 I pin are long pins or similar.
So many guides to getting your content seen and shared on Pinterest, especially if you run a food or DIY website extol the virtues of Long Pins, and explain how to embed them into your blog posts.
However, you need to remember that your Pinterest is a cross section of your creative brain.
From the food you like to eat, the fonts you find pretty and the shopping pics you've bookmarked, the average Pinterest page gives you a snapshot into the mind, the likes and the dislikes of the person who has created it. For an influencer building boards outside of the exact focus of your brand (okay, so you sell beautiful, handmade pottery? Create boards to show what food/ flowers could be displayed in your creations, the sort of rooms they'd look great in, the town or city they're created in?) also helps give your brand roots and give people an idea of how you'd slot into their lifestyle.
But how does all of this impact Long Pins?
Well, Pinterest is an image based platform. Ask most Pinterest influencers out there (and by Pinterest influencer I'm talking about someone who is considered an influencer on Pinterest, not an influencer elsewhere who uses Pinterest to promote their content) and they'll be able to describe the aesthetic requirements for any photo they want to pin to their boards; it's a quick mental process they'll run through whenever they're scrolling through their feed ready to pin. Pinterest is a photo platform; text is secondary to the images. Aesthetic requirements are all about the pictures and having a clean and consistent look and feel, and different fonts and block colours can more oftern than not mess with that.
By using Long Pins exclusively to promote your content you're catering to people who use search to find information, not the influencers capable of giving your content a big boost who work on aesthetics.
However, all that being said, in moderation, for a curated feed, Long Pins are not necessarily a bad thing. While I don't find that certain pieces of content perform any better when they're in this format from their high res, Pinterest optimised, regular photo cousins, they can be useful for promoting content where there is simply not enough portrait imagery available, when you're trying to show a clear step by step method, and to share the same content across multiple boards without it seeming like you're pinning the same picture again and again.
Just remember, creating Long Pins is not the only thing you should do to drive traffic back to your site.
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