How to use Pinterest to master inspirational video
Pinterest inspires people to try new things from recipes to new makeup looks, home projects to DIY crafts, and so much more. Videos on Pinterest are quickly becoming one of the top creative tools where helpful and inspiring content thrives. In fact, the number of video views on Pinterest last year grew more than 6x compared to 2018.*
We continue to see increased views of organic video pins—up 240% year on year—particularly driven by food and beverage, beauty, DIY, entertainment and home decor.
Modern media company, Tastemade, for example, has uploaded tens of thousands of unique videos to Pinterest, which has generated more than 2.2 billion views over the years. As Tastemade continues to build an audience on Pinterest, Pinners are increasingly seeking out their videos like spring-forward flavors, spring cleaning, and comforting meals now that people are spending more time at home and learning new skills and recipes. In the past year, searches for “Tastemade cake videos” increased by 355% on Pinterest.
Below are a few tips for content creators using video on Pinterest.
Opt for evergreen
Search and recommendations help this type of video get discovered over time. Multimedia artist Josie Lewis uploaded her watercolor videos (like this ‘transparent watercolor diamonds’ piece) and got millions of views and over a million saves. “The thing about Pinterest that's really valuable to me is that it’s searchable,” says Lewis. “The videos can live on forever and people can always find them. I have some old videos that are still getting a lot of views, click-throughs and are generating a lot of attention. They are not buried in a feed like on other social media channels.”
Be consistent
Regularly schedule your video uploads to grow your following over time. "When I saw that you could publish videos on Pinterest, I uploaded a few videos on a whim and they just exploded,” says Kolbie Blume, a watercolor artist from This Writing Desk. Her watercolor sunset video has nearly six million views. “In April 2019, I had about 500 followers on my Pinterest profile and after two weeks of posting three to four videos a day, I jumped to 25k followers. My monthly viewers went up to 10M in two weeks.”
Quality and time count
Pinners want to see entire recipes and projects from start to finish. Always try to keep videos between 45 seconds and 3 minutes long. Next, consider a good balance of entertainment and information, and record in vertical mode whenever possible. Since Tastemade is a well-known authority on food, they add tips and tricks and then viewers like it, boosting watch time.
Pinners are gonna Pin
Planning and trend watching reigns supreme. Valentines’ Day, Halloween, and Christmas typically see search increases two to three months prior to the actual holiday. Build out your video content (see Sarah Hearts’ Red Velvet Popcorn) using Pinterest Trends to identify the best times to schedule and publish Pins, to add descriptions, and to build specific boards and sections that relate to the corresponding holiday.
Measure your success with lifetime analytics
Review your performance metrics right on your Pins with Pin stats, a tool that shows the performance for each Pin. Pin stats include impressions, closeups, link clicks and saves, as well as video metrics like total and average watch time and video views.
Video continues to be an important investment as we see Pinners, Creators and Businesses seeing the value in storytelling with sight, sound, and motion. Last month, we onboarded partners to allow advertisers to authenticate video views with new measurement partners, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, who join our existing partner Moat. Business accounts have access to see which videos people are watching and look at video engagement metrics (like views and watch times for organic and video ads) in the updated Analytics tab. Keep an eye out for upcoming creator community news and check out our new Business Community for peer-to-peer support and self-paced learning on how to maximize your Pinterest presence.
Methodology
Percent increases are calculated using normalized searches from February ‘19 to February ‘20.
Pinterest internal data, Global, April 2019 vs. April 2020.