What You Need to Know About Idea Pins on Pinterest
Ah Pinterest. Always making changes <insert eye roll here>. Have you seen on Pinterest that Story Pins are now Idea Pins? In May 2021 Pinterest introduced Idea Pins globally, meaning they should be available in every account now. But what the heck are Idea Pins anyway, and how can you use them as part of your Pinterest strategy? Read on to find out!
Basically Idea Pins are multi-slide pins – think Instagram Stories – but they don’t disappear after 24 hours like Instagram Stories. They live on in your Pinterest account and are great for increasing engagement on your account. They typically receive 8x more engagement than a standard pin and can rack up thousands of impressions in a short space of time as Pinterest is heavily favouring them.
If you don’t see Idea Pins on your account, here’s how to request access to Idea Pins.
Ideas for Idea Pins on Pinterest
Idea Pins are amazing for how to guides e.g. How to Style a Shelf, How to Use Keywords on Pinterest, tutorials, recipes and before and afters. Here’s an example of an Idea Pin which has over 14k views. There’s no way I would get that many views on Instagram, for example! If you can make an Instagram Reel out of it, you can make an Idea Pin!
They’re great for self contained content, such as a full length tutorial. Don’t ask your followers to leave Pinterest to complete the task, they need to get the whole thing from the Idea Pin. Pinterest has designed these types of pin for in app engagement, so asking your followers to go to your website isn’t the idea. Some ideas for Idea Pins:
- Your favourite places in a specific city, e.g. great bookshops in London
- Dream travel destinations
- Bucket list destinations
- Best beaches to visit
- Travel destinations with kids
- Best UK beaches
- Gift guides
- Christmas shopping guides
- Favourite small businesses
- Local businesses you love
- Your products (if youβre a maker or shop owner)
- Life hacks
- Create tutorials for home dΓ©cor
- Create step-by-step guides to crafts
- Create recipes
- Create before and afters of your home
- Behind the scenes snippets
How to make an Idea Pin
Creating an Idea Pin is simple. In your Pinterest account, head to Create and select Idea Pin. Here you’ll be able to upload up to 20 images or videos (or a combination of both. The size to create your Idea Pins is a 9:16 aspect ratio. If making them in Canva, use the Instagram Stories template. You’ll have the option to change the order of your slides and delete slides if necessary. You can customise each individual slide with text overlays and soon you’ll be able to tag other users (hello affiliate marketing?), add stickers and more. I don’t have this option yet but it’s coming!
When you have added in your slides, you can add in a keyword rich title so your Idea Pin is discoverable. Select the board you’d like to publish your pin to – make it the most relevant board for that pin. Add up to 10 relevant tags – this is quite limited so there might not be a relevant tag here, so don’t worry if not. You can add in a list of supplies needed to complete the project or a note to describe your Idea Pin. When you’ve finished editing your Pin, hit Publish and it’ll go live! Published Idea Pins live at the top of your Created tab.
Make sure to include a call to action, but one that’s along the lines of “let me know in the comments if you’ve tried this” or “follow for more tutorials”. Don’t ask people to visit your site and definitely don’t add in your URL. Pinterest is reducing distribution of Idea Pins with a URL in.
The major downside of Idea Pins is the inability to link to your website or blog. The aim of the other types of pin e.g. standard, video, carousel is to link to your website, encouraging visitors to your site. Idea Pins are a new type of pin which Pinterest wants to be in app engagement only. According to Pinterest they’re not for self promotion, they’re to build a strong engaged audience and are designed to keep people on Pinterest.
Make of that what you will, but Idea Pins are here to stay so should form a part of your overall Pinterest marketing strategy. If you want to grow your Pinterest account, you need to make use of all the different pin formats as they all work together to bring more traffic to your account.
A word of caution – Idea Pins are great for some accounts but don’t work as well for others, so it’ll be a case of trial and error to see how many Idea Pins you need to include in your pinning schedule. You should definitely try and include them though, as they bring eyes to your account and can result in an increase in followers. Saying that, some accounts have noticed a drop in engagement on static pins following the use of Idea Pins, myself included, so I don’t really use them on my Wildflower Pinterest Management account.
What do you think of Idea Pins on Pinterest? Do you use them?
I’ve been on pinterest for some time now and I still can’t figure it out so this post is very useful for me. Thank you for sharing your tips on idea pins, can’t wait to try them!
You’re so welcome! Idea pins will be great to increase your engagement on Pinterest π
I’m saving this post to read it again and again and gain better results!
You are gold! β₯ Thank you!
Thank you so much!