How To Craft The Perfect Pinterest Pin In 8 Steps, Sizes & Hashtags

With 250 million monthly users, Pinterest is a valuable tool for any online retailer in 2023. It’s a highly visual curation platform which, if used properly, is perfect for advertising your products and showing off your brand’s value.

It’s proving to be a big stepping stop in the customer journey, with a huge percentage of people using Pinterest to research their desired product before going on to buy it.

If you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur or business owner and you’re new to Pinterest, it may all seem a bit daunting. You know that it’s a great social channel with plenty of lead gen potential, but where do you even start? What is the perfect pin? Maybe you’ve admired other people’s but you’re not sure how to get there yourself.

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Check out our guide below on how to craft the perfect Pinterest Pin in 8 simple steps.

Step 1: Find your niche and talk to your audience

The first rule of anything on social media: do your research. Any strategy or campaign you have needs to be based on some sort of research or stats. It’s not sexy, but it’s true. And effective.

The perfect pin isn’t perfect because it’s pretty. It’s perfect because it reaches a wide audience, shows off your product and gets people to engage.

You need to appeal to the right audience. Pinterest’s users are mostly young — 1 in 2 US millennials use Pinterest every month — and predominantly female — around 80% of all Pinterest users are women.

But that’s not to say you should be trying to aim for exactly this demographic. If you know who you’re already targeting with your brand, then apply this to your Pinterest strategy. Create pins that will appeal to your chosen audience — use images and language that they would use themselves.

Step 2: Show off your products

It goes without saying that when you’re choosing the perfect image for Pinterest, you need to aim for a high quality, attractive image that shows off your product.

Use a high-quality camera and good lighting to capture the best angles and details of your product. You need to entice the viewer with something worth clicking on.

Pinterest Tips and Tricks — Image credit: Pinterest

Combining multiple products in one image is a great way of showing off what your company’s got to offer. For example, if you sell clothing and accessories, you can make an outfit pin like this one by The Stockplace:

The fashion brand (which is currently listed for sale on Exchange) is aimed towards young women and is a great example of Pinterest potential. Rather than just a simple photo of a t-shirt, you can create a collage of items which would work well together as an outfit or in your wardrobe. This feeds into the whole Pinterest concept of creating bigger ideas and thought boards of collections, rather than sticking to one product.

Step 3: Make sure your image is the perfect size and shape

But there are a few additional things you need to consider about your image.

It might not necessarily be something you’ve thought about, but size and shape are important for optimizing your pin’s performance.

The ideal pin should have an image aspect ratio of 2:3 to 1:3.5. This means going vertical rather than horizontal: Pinterest loves long pins and so do mobiles.

80% of people use Pinterest on mobile, so having a vertical image will increase your engagement, rank better, and make your pin stand out more. Just make sure you keep your pin under 1260 pixels tall (by 600 width) — a pin that’s too long will get cropped on mobile and mess up your aesthetics.

Pro Tip: If you want to get the maximum reach on Pinterest you need to give Tailwind a try. Tailwind allows you to schedule your Pinterest pins and also network with other Tribes of Tailwind and Pinterest users.

Step 4: Edit with graphic design tools

If you need extra help with making your pin stunning, you can use a variety of awesome graphic design tools.

Design tools like Canva (which is free!) or PicMonkey (free to try, or $4.99 a month) will help you to create attractive eye-catching pins — whether you’re making a collage, an infographic or overlaying text. They have plenty of editing and designing options to help you create unique images or optimize the ones you have already for Pinterest. For example, you might have brand colors and tones that you want to include in your pin.

Research on over a half million images on Pinterest also shows that warmer tones and lighter pins perform better on Pinterest. Images with medium lightness have a repin rate twenty times higher than for images that are mostly dark, and eight times higher than images that are very light.

Warmer colors and tones such as red and orange also get twice as many pins as cold colors and tones like blue.

Step 5: Add text that will appeal to your audience

It’s not all about the image, however. You need to craft a thoughtful and interesting description (in 150 words or less) which will appeal to your audience.

Include helpful, valuable information (as well as keywords — more on those later) about the pin. What does the pin show? Why should the viewer be interested? Where do they find out more?

You also need to approach your pin text with care and style. You want to paint a picture — Pinterest is a vibrant, visual platform where people go to gather ideas and inspiration. You want to appeal to this. As this useful guide on writing Pinterest image descriptions says, writing a great Pinterest description is “part art, part science”.

Another top tip: avoid salesly copy. This comes across as insincere and aggressive and will deter people from clicking through to your site or product.

Step 6: Optimize for search

Crafting the ultimate pin isn’t just about creating something beautiful — it’s also about optimization. What’s the point in a pretty pin if people — and search engines — can’t find it?

You need to optimize your text and image for search. You can do this by including keywords specific to your niche or industry.

There are plenty of places you can include relevant keywords to make your pin more search-friendly:

Title
Image filename
Description
Alt text
Meta description and title

Remember that shoving as many keywords as possible into your pin won’t be beneficial. It’ll just scare away humans and search engines alike.

Step 7: Add your hashtags

How to use Pinterest Hashtags — Image credit: Burst

For a long time, Pinterest didn’t have an option for hashtags. But last year, everything changed. Now, the platform endorses the use of hashtags and gives high visibility to hashtags in search results. If you’re aiming to craft the perfect pin, you should definitely include hashtags to boost your pin’s reach.

When you’re deciding which hashtags you want to use on your pin, try to be objective; use logical hashtags that are relevant to your pin. Seasonal holiday hashtags work well (e.g. #merrychristmas or #happyhalloween), as do evergreen topics such as #homedecor or #weddingplanning.

Stick to around 4 hashtags — any more than this is spammy and annoys people.

Step 8: Check your analytics

Crafting the perfect pin is not just a one-off: it’s something you should work at and perfect over time. There’s not going to be a “perfect” everlasting pin template that will work well for your brand forever. You’re going to need to experiment and play around with your pins to see which ones resonate with your followers the most.

Using analytics tools will help you to get more out of your pins. You can use one of these analytics tools or the platform’s own analytics feature to get insight into your performance metrics and how people interact with your pins.

Check your analytics frequently to see what works and what you can change.

Crafting the perfect Pinterest Pin doesn’t have to be difficult. Just follow these 8 steps to make the most of this valuable marketing tool.

How To Craft The Perfect Pinterest Pin In 8 Steps