You must have heard by now how different social networking sites are now becoming popular ways of promoting your business as well as attracting increasing traffic to your website. The world’s third most popular social networking site, Pinterest, is one such business promoting tool that can stimulate your sales in effective ways.
Launched in 2010, Pinterest has grown significantly within the last 4 years, proving all of its critics incorrect who have claimed this site to be just a fad or flash in the pan. It has proved itself to be an efficient business driver for a number of brands that are now established both in the marketplace as well as in the minds of the target customers.
The best feature of Pinterest is that it was able to promptly identify how different businesses, especially ecommerce ones, were able to utilize social media to boost up sales and acquire increased traffic. It then got more creative in becoming more useful to such proactive businesses. This is why it has been able to have such a major impact on the ecommerce industry in such a short span of time. So if you want to drive meaningful traffic to your ecommerce business, there’s every reason for you to be using Pinterest. And for that you need to know what kinds of images to pin and what really makes the photos powerful enough to drive traffic. Wazala is here to tell you all about it.
- No to human faces
While our common sense might tell us that pictures with human faces are more effective in social media sites since after all, we are all human who can relate more to human images, this does not apply for Pinterest. In fact the complete opposite holds true for Pinterest. Pinned images without human faces are actually repined around 23 percent more than those with human faces. This is because different social networking sites are effective and used for different reasons – for instance, Facebook is considered to be a network of people while Foursquare is thought of as a network of places. Likewise, Pinterest is considered to be a network of things where human faces act as a diversion, rather than a stimulus. Your brand might revolve around human features, so it might be difficult to not use human faces for the pictures. However you have to find creative ways to do without the faces, without hampering your intended message or quality.
- No to background spaces
This applies to almost all kinds of images in all kinds of sites, not just Pinterest. You need to keep the background spaces in the pictures as little as possible. Why? So that the item/items you are trying to emphasize on remains the central point which quickly stands out from the rest of the picture. When the background is 40 percent or more of the entire image, the probability of the number of repins gets halved or even worst quartered. So keep the background space to a minimum to get maximum clicks and repins. The best is to use white as the background color for the pictures so that the product stays as the focal point of the photo.
- Yes to vibrant colors
Don’t shy away from strong and vibrant colors when it comes to pinning images on Pinterest. Strong colors do work, appealing to the visual senses of people and helping the pictures to get noticed easily and quickly. So be bold with colors and use a variety of strong colors for your images. But make sure the background stays comparatively pale and plain. Images with a range of vibrant colors tend to be thrice more likely to get more
repins and engagement in Pinterest.
- Yes to red
When it comes to colors, don’t avoid red. Red or orange can benefit your pinned images more than you think. Being a warm color, it tends to kindle prompter call to action from people. The reason is that it boosts up the heart rate which can motivate people to buy more or buy impulsively. When you use a lot of red or orange in your photos, the likelihood of getting repins gets double and enhances engagement.
- Yes to color and lighting moderation
You shouldn’t go overboard with too much of anything. It applies to color saturation and lighting of the pictures too. Color saturation is the intensity or brightness of colors. This means that unsaturated pictures are basically black and white ones. Assuming that overly saturated pictures will be repinned more is incorrect. In fact such images tend to have the probability of being repinned lessened to four times than that of moderately saturated pictures. Even unsaturated or black and white images tend to be repinned ten times less than moderate ones. Same goes for lighting. Too dark or too light images gave the probability of being 20 times less than the ones with moderate lighting. Thus make sure to be balanced and moderate with both color saturation and lighting level.
- Yes to portrait orientation
Finally, it’s better to go for portrait orientation rather than landscape. The reason – portrait orientation facilitates people to focus on the focal point of the picture. Moreover, it tends to be more apt with the platform layout of Pinterest, particularly for smartphones, tablets and such devices. So what are you waiting for? Begin your wonderful journey on Pinterest to make your ecommerce business much more profitable.
Have you found any other specific image attributes worked well for you in Pinterest? Share them with us in the comments..
Image by: mkhmarketing
