Having a basic understanding of social media statistics gives you an idea of the type of people who use the social media platform, if they fit into your audience and what people expect from brands on each platform.

Throughout this article, we’re covering Pinterest statistics like demographics, behavior, business stats and more.

The post 24 must-know Pinterest stats for marketers in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Whether it’s a brand promotion, video, news update or even a meme, visual content rules the social media landscape. What has become so important is effectively conveying your brand on social media through images and video.

The visual face of your brand is oftentimes the first thing your audience sees and possibly the one thing they remember. It’s difficult to reuse the same image across all social networks unless you have a free social media image resizing tool like Landscape.

Sprout Social’s very own tool is free to use to resize, crop and scale social media image sizes. And along with our resizing tool, we’ve provided all the specific dimensions and a few quick tips to help you decide which image best fits each position.

Before we get into it, here are some additional resources:

• Easily reference this social media image sizes list in our always up-to-date Google Doc.
• Bookmark our social media video specs and ad guide!
• Download free social media images that are already optimized!

Easily manage multimedia content with Sprout

Sprout’s Asset Library simplifies publishing and asset management by providing you with a centralized location to store images, videos and text.

Quickly create, organize, edit and publish assets directly from the Asset Library to deliver on-brand, visually engaging posts for any connected social network.

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Social Media Image Sizes Per Network

These links will make it easier for you to navigate to the specific social media image sizes per network:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• YouTube
• Google My Business

Facebook Image Sizes

With 2.96 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. For that reason alone, it’s important to have attractive and engaging images that are optimized for the platform.

Remember that different devices, whether it’s mobile or desktop, render differently. Make sure that you are choosing dimensions based on where you want the majority of viewers to see your image.

Learn more about Facebook image sizes

Get specs and tips for implementing the best visual content on Facebook with these guides:

• Always up-to-date list of Facebook ad sizes & specs
• The Picture-Perfect Facebook Cover Photo Size
• Facebook Event Photo Size & Dimensions Guide

Facebook Profile Picture

Say cheese: your profile picture represents you or your brand on Facebook. This is the round photo that appears on your timeline layered over your cover photo. Your profile picture will also appear when you post to other walls, comment on posts or when your profile is searched.

Facebook profile picture image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 320×320 pixels
• Minimum file size: 180×60 pixels
• Displays:
  • 176×176 pixels (desktop)
  • 196×196 pixels (smartphones)
  • 36×36 pixels (most feature phones)
• Recommended file type: JPG, PNG
• Profile pictures are cropped to a circle

Facebook Business Page Profile Picture

Facebook changed its Profile image for Business Pages to appear to the left side of the screen. The new look helps Facebook Business Pages follow a similar appearance as personal accounts. However, the dimensions are the same, but the photo appears on the page slightly different.

Facebook Business Page profile image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 320×320 pixels
• Minimum file size: 180×60 pixels
• Displays:
  • 176×176 pixels (desktop)
  • 196×196 pixels (smartphones)
  • 36×36 pixels (most feature phones)
  • Recommended file type: JPG, PNG
• Profile pictures are cropped to a circle

Facebook Profile and Business Page Cover Photo

Your Facebook cover photo will only appear on your Facebook timeline, and it stretches across the entire screen, which gives you more freedom to choose something creative or supplement your profile picture. Where your profile picture might be a good choice for a picture of you or a brand logo, use this space to post something that speaks more toward you as an individual or as a brand.

Facebook profile and Business Page cover photo image guidelines

• Ratio: 16:9
• Minimum required size: 400×150 pixels
• Recommended image size: 851×315 pixels
• Mobile display size: 640×260 pixels
• Max file size: 100kb
• Recommended file type: JPG, PNG
• Notes:
  • The left side of your cover photo will be covered by your profile picture. On mobile, it could be 75% of your profile picture will overlap into the cover photo.
  • Images with a logo or text may be best as a PNG file
  • Business Page dimensions are exactly the same as personal accounts.

Facebook Shared Image

A shared image is one of the most common forms of sharing on Facebook. These images will always appear on your timeline, and ideally they will show up in most of your followers’ News Feeds — though with the Facebook algorithm determining which content will be served, it’s unlikely that everyone will see your post. The more people engage with your post, the more likely it is that the rest of your followers and their followers will see that activity.

Facebook shared image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1080×1350 pixels
• Maximum file size: 8MB
• Recommended file type: JPG, PNG, GIF
• Appears in feed at a max width of 470 pixels (will scale to a max of 1:1)
• Appears on page at a max width of 504 pixels (will scale to a max of 1:1)

Facebook Shared Link

Another great tool in your Facebook belt is the ability to share a link. It’s very similar to posting a shared image, but it gives you even more fields to work with. You can choose to create a shared link with a small square image to the left and text on the right, or with a larger rectangular image on top with text underneath.

Facebook shared link image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1080×1350 pixels
• Displays:
  • 479×246 pixels (desktop)
  • 320 pixel width (mobile)
• Minimum size: 200×200 pixels
• Maximum file size: 8MB
• Facebook will scale photos under the minimum dimensions. For better results, increase image resolution at the same scale as the minimum size.

Facebook Event Image

Facebook Events help capture the attention of users and cut through the noise on Facebook. Reminders are sent to your audience and having a good space with an even better image is important. Make sure you have the right dimensions down for a Facebook Event cover photo.

Facebook Event image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1920×1005
• Facebook will scale down to minimum dimensions: 400×150 pixels
• Facebook recommends for best results, choose photos that are 400×150 pixels.

Facebook Fundraiser image

Facebook has added the ability to create a fundraiser for charitable organizations or personal causes. The cover photo for these fundraisers slightly varies from a typical Facebook cover photo, with a minimum size of 400×150. The best experience across many display types will come from a higher resolution image, though.

Looking for Facebook ad sizes?

Facebook ad formatting can be even more complex than organic posts, so for more guidelines, check out our complete guide to every Facebook ad size!

Find more information on the image sizes for Facebook, visit the Facebook Help Center.

Twitter Image Sizes

With 436 million monthly active users, Twitter is one of the social media networks that your customers will most often use to discuss your brand.

X (fka Twitter) Profile Photo

Your X profile photo is the main image that represents you or your brand across the network. It’s going to be seen across the site in a number of places by a number of people so make sure it’s of the highest quality. Here’s the places your profile photo will be visible on the site.

• On your page: The largest display of your profile picture is on your homepage and can be viewed by your followers as well as individuals who stumble upon your page.
• In-stream: A smaller version of your profile picture appears in a follower’s X stream every time you Post or are Reposted.
• Who to follow: Your profile picture is also going to appear next to a link to your page in the “Who to follow” box. This is located directly to the right of your X stream on desktop. Choose a recognizable image here.

X (fka Twitter) profile photo image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 400×400 pixels
• Maximum file size: 5MB
• Image types include: JPG, GIF or PNG

X (fka Twitter) Header Photo

Your header photo is the image that spans the top of your X profile page. It’s quite a bit larger than your profile photo so make sure to save it at the highest resolution possible. Because you have more room to be creative with this picture and it will likely be the first thing your visitors see, make it something captivating.

X (fka Twitter) header image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1500×500 pixels
• Maximum file size: 5MB
• Recommended file type: JPG, GIF or PNG

X (fka Twitter) In-Stream Photos and Shared Links

X users can attach photos to any of their Posts. Depending on whether you’re attaching one or many photos or sharing a link, the way photos crop and display in stream will vary slightly.

Fortunately, in 2021, X made waves with #TwitterCropIsGone, eliminating the sometimes-unfavorable automated cropping for vertical images that had often become the subject of memes and in-jokes among users of the platform. Extremely wide or tall images with unusual dimensions may still get cropped, but for most images in standard 4:3 or 16:9 dimensions, you won’t have to worry as much about centering subjects around automated cropping.

The following are some best practices to get an optimal result, and you can also preview the end result in Sprout’s Compose window before you publish.

Recommended sizes for images by types of Posts:

• Recommended image sizes:
  • Minimum: 600×335 pixels
  • Landscape: 1024×512 pixels (minimum) and 1600×900 pixels (recommended)
  • Square: 1080×1080 pixels
  • Portrait: 1080×1350 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio: 16:9
• Maximum file size:
  • 5 MB for JPG, PNG on mobile and desktop
  • 5 MB for GIFs on mobile
  • 15 MB for GIFs on desktop
• Maximum number of images per post: 4 images

Find more information on in-stream photos at the X Help Center.

Instagram Image Sizes

Instagram is one of the most popular photo-sharing social networks. It’s the best place to showcase your visual creativity, even down to making a compelling grid out of the way your photos’ thumbnails display in sequence.

Instagram Profile Picture

Instagram is based on visuals, which should be an indication of how important it is to follow these image size guidelines. Ensure your profile image is recognizable so users can find you even easier through search or explore.

Instagram profile picture image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 110×110 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio: 1:1, 4:5

Instagram Photo Size (Feed & Ad)

Because Instagram is all about sharing visual content – both images and videos – that appear in your followers’ feeds, it’s important to use higher resolution photos. Whether you’re posting natively in the app, via desktop or through a social media management tool, these guidelines below will help you put your best foot forward.

Instagram photo size (feed & ad) image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1080×1080 pixels or 1080×1350 pixels
• Recommended minimum width: 1080 pixels
  • Images with a width between 320 and 1080 pixels will be kept at the original resolution as long as it fits the recommended aspect ratio listed below
  • If images are a lower resolution, Instagram will enlarge to a width of 320 pixels
  • If images are a higher resolution, Instagram will shrink it to a width of 1080 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio: 1.91:1 or 4:5
  • Images will be cropped to fit a supported ratio
• Maximum file size: 8MB
• Recommended file type: JPG and PNG
• Maximum number of images per post: 10 images

Instagram Photo Thumbnails

When someone goes to your page, they’ll be presented with all of your content arranged in rows of thumbnails. These smaller renditions of your images and videos will expand when clicked and include a place for people to comment.

Instagram photo thumbnails image guidelines

• Thumbnails will appear at 161×161 pixels
• Recommended image width: 1080 pixel
• Feed aspect ratio: 1:1

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are a popular source of visuals on the app. There are both video and image options available to publish. And while this feature was originally meant to be ephemeral, it’s possible to upload your own content and build a strategy around Stories engagement.

Instagram Story image guidelines

• Recommended resolution: 1080×1920
• Minimum resolution: 150×150
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
  • Aspect ratio for Instagram Story images published through Sprout: 4:5 to 1.91:1

For those looking for more info on Instagram ad sizes, including video specs, check out this guide!

TikTok Image Sizes

With 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok has grown considerably over the last few years. With nearly half its users under the age of 30, TikTok is becoming the social platform for younger target audiences.

TikTok Profile Image

All TikTok users have the option to upload a profile image to their accounts. This is the perfect opportunity for businesses to showcase their personalities through branding or to highlight a specific campaign.

TikTok profile image guidelines

• Minimum image size: 200×200 pixels
• Recommended file type: JPG, GIF or PNG

Looking for more TikTok specs? Our Always-Up-To-Date Video Specs guide can answer those questions.

LinkedIn Image Sizes

With 467 million registered users, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. Where other social networks may be good drivers of traffic and customers, LinkedIn is a great place for you to source great employees and to connect with other industry leaders.

LinkedIn Personal Profile Image

LinkedIn started using a new layout for personal profiles and kept the box logo with company pages (more on that below). However, the personal profile dimensions for LinkedIn is very straightforward. This is the main image that represents you on your personal profile. So anytime someone takes a look at your profile for some quick info, this is the prominent image that represents you. It’s important to get the size right.

LinkedIn personal profile image guidelines

• Minimum image size: 268×268 pixels
• Recommended image size: 400×400 pixels
• Maximum file size: 3MB
• Recommended file type: JPG or PNG

LinkedIn Cover Image

LinkedIn’s background image is a newer feature for your personal profile. It’s a little bit trickier to find something that really fits that space well, but if you get it right, your profile will look great.

LinkedIn cover image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1128×191 pixels
• Maximum file size: 3MB
• Recommended file type: JPG or PNG

LinkedIn Company Logo Image

One of the two brand logos that you should be uploading to LinkedIn is the standard company logo. This is the bigger of the two and is going to show up right next to your brand name on your LinkedIn homepage. This image also appears in the “Companies you may want to follow” section. The more enticing the photo, the more likely you’ll gain followers.

LinkedIn Company logo image guidelines

• Minimum image size: 268×268 pixels
• Recommended image size: 400×400 pixels
• Maximum file size: 3MB
• Recommended file type: JPG or PNG

LinkedIn Company Cover Image

Unlike the personal background image, the company or standard business background image covers the entire top of the page. The image appears much larger than the personal dimensions, giving businesses a bit more space.

LinkedIn Company cover image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 1128×191 pixels
• Maximum file size: 3MB natively
• Maximum file size: 5MB via Sprout
• Recommended file type: JPG or PNG

LinkedIn Shared Image or Link

This size works for LinkedIn posts that share a photo or a link with an image to a blog post or article to your company page’s feed.

LinkedIn shared image or link image guidelines

• Recommended image size for links: 1200×627 pixels, based on mobile scaling
• Recommended file type: JPG or PNG

LinkedIn Life Tab – Main Image & Company Photos

The Life tab on LinkedIn company pages lets you provide a more in-depth look at the day to day experience of your company’s employees. Currently, the two types of images you can upload here are the main image, which serves as a hero and highlight to your page, and the horizontal scrolling gallery of other company photos beneath.

LinkedIn Life tab image guidelines

• Recommended size for main image: 1128×376
• Recommended size for company photos: 900×600
• Recommended file type: JPG or PNG
• The Life tab only appears on the mobile app, and not the mobile web version of LinkedIn, so exact display sizes will vary by device. Upload the recommended size for the best experience.

Find more information in the LinkedIn Help Center.

Pinterest Image Sizes

Pinterest Profile Picture

When setting up your Pinterest account you have the option to do so using Facebook, Google or email. If you choose Facebook or Google, Pinterest will pull in the profile image that you have set there.

If you’re using email, or would prefer to use a different photo, you can do that too: just upload a square photograph (the larger the better) and Pinterest will resize it to fit. Like other social sites your profile picture on Pinterest should be something closely tied to you or your brand.

Pinterest profile picture image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 165×165 pixels
• Maximum file size: 10MB
• Recommended image type: JPG and PNG

Pinterest Pin Sizes

When adding a pin to your board, it’s important to remember that Pinterest puts a limit on the width of the image but not the length. This gives you the opportunity to add a photo that’s square or one that will scale to be even taller. Just remember to make sure you’re creating large images because they add more value, not just because you can.

Pinterest Pin sizes image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 735×1102 pixels
• Recommended ratio: 2:3
• Recommended file size: 20MB max, but only 10 MB when publishing via Sprout
• Recommended file type: JPG, PNG, GIF
• Note: Larger are resized to display at a width of 238 pixels with scaled height in feeds.

Text Guidelines

• Title character count: 100 characters max
• Textbox character count: 250 characters max

Pinterest Board Display

Creating boards is one of the most important things that you can do on Pinterest. Not only is it important to choose a photo that is enticing to your audience, it’s important to choose one that’s relevant to that particular board.

Pinterest Board display image guidelines

• Final display: 222×150 pixels (large thumbnail)
• Final display: 55×55 pixels (smaller thumbnail)

Find more information in the Pinterest Help Center.

YouTube Image Sizes

YouTube has more than 2.5 billion unique users every month and is available on hundreds of millions of devices. Millions of brands have already realized that YouTube is a great opportunity to reach their fan-base.

YouTube Channel Profile Image

YouTube allows you to select different profile image borders, but the dimensions stay the same. Ensure your YouTube has a profile image set up before you select your border.

YouTube Channel profile image guidelines

• Recommended image size: 800×800 pixels
• Minimum image size: 98×98 pixels
• Maximum file size: 4MB
• Recommended image files: PNG or GIF (no animations)

YouTube Channel Cover Photo

Spice up your YouTube channel with some “channel art.” When users click through your YouTube videos to your channel, some appealing images could entice them to stay on your page longer and watch more of your videos.

YouTube Channel cover photo image guidelines

• Recommended file size: 2560×1440 pixels
• Minimum file size: 2048×1152 pixels
• Safe area for mobile and web (without text and logo cropping): 1546×423 pixels
• Maximum file size: 6MB
• Recommended image files: PNG or GIF

Across Different Devices

There are a lot of different platforms and devices that users can stream YouTube on so it’s important that you review your creative across devices and confirm that the most important parts of your image, such as text or logos, are displaying legibly in the “safe zone” noted above.

Find more information in the YouTube Help Center.

YouTube Video Uploads

Uploading your content to YouTube is the one of the most important parts of establishing your presence on the site. Videos can tell viewers something about you as a person, or it could show off something that your business might offer.

YouTube video guidelines

• Videos must maintain a 16:9 aspect ratio. Smaller videos such as 4:3 will be pillarboxed to fit.
• YouTube Shorts must maintain a 9:16 aspect ratio and 1920×1080 pixels.

For more on the specifics of YouTube video optimization, or to size video on any other social network, check out our complete guide to social media video specs.

Google My Business Image Sizes

Google My Business has become an essential platform for businesses with local, brick-and-mortar presences to gain visibility and conduct their review management strategy.

Types of Images for Google My Business

• Logo: Your recognizable logo image. May not be available for all types of businesses–see Google guidelines for more detail.
• Cover photo: A photo of your business that will typically be the first one shown. Choose a photo that gives the best overall representation of your place of business for this photo.
• Business photo: You can use your other business photos to highlight different elements of your business or offices and help show off what local visiting customers should look for when they stop by.

For all three types of images, Google’s official guidelines recommend the below specs for the best appearance on the platform.

Google My Business image guidelines

• Recommended resolution: 720×720 pixels
• Minimum resolution: 250×250 pixels
• File size maximum: 5 MB
• Image file type: JPG or PNG

The post Always up-to-date guide to social media image sizes appeared first on Sprout Social.

Staying relevant and capturing your audience’s attention is a constant challenge for marketers. And now that brands rely on video content more than ever, it’s critical to use the correct social media video specs and advertising video sizes.

To simplify marketers’ efforts, we created a complete guide of every single social media video spec and advertising video dimension.

Before we start, here are some additional resources that keep the information in one place:

• Easily reference our social media video specs in our always up-to-date Google Doc.
• Looking for image sizes? Check out our social media image sizes guide for help.
• Want to get better results with video? Download our social media video content workbook.

Social Media Video Specs & Ad Sizes By Network

We’ve gathered data on each social network’s specific video sizes and specs. Simply click the links below to jump to your desired network:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Twitter
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat

Start your free trial

Facebook Video Specs

Facebook video is consumed at higher rates each year, so it’s no wonder why so many marketers search for the correct Facebook video specs.

There are simply so many types of videos you can share on Facebook and the platform updates its design frequently. Each video format has different dimensions and specs, which can make it confusing to know whether or not you’re uploading the correct format for organic or paid posts. Follow the specs below to optimize your posts.

In-Feed Shared Post Video (Landscape & Portrait)

The most common type of video on Facebook comes from shared posts. This type of video lives in your Facebook Feed, and can be shared by brands or your friends. While it’s not as easy to get organic reach on Facebook, it’s still a viable way to share video.

You can choose between two video orientations: Landscape and Portrait. Here’s a look at the video specs for both.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1280×720, 720×1280
• Minimum width: 1200 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 16:9, 9:16
• Max file size: 10GB (3GB max in Sprout)
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV
• Video length: 1 second to 240 minutes (45 minutes max, if uploading in Sprout)
• Bitrate: 256kbps
• Frame rate: 30fps

360 Video

Facebook’s 360 Video allows users to get a complete 360-degree view by scrolling with a cursor on the web, by touch or turning the device on mobile.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution depends on the type of content:
  • Monoscopic: 5120×2560 maximum
  • Stereoscopic: 5120×5120 maximum
• Aspect ratio depends on the type of content:
  • Monoscopic: 2:1
  • Stereoscopic: 1:1
• Max file size: 10GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV
• Video length: 1 second to 30 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fp

Facebook Reels

The convenience of cross-posting your Instagram Reels to Facebook expands the reach of your videos. This format appears organically in feeds but often gets priority on Facebook feeds.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080p
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: No file size limit
• Recommended video formats: MP4
• Video length: 3 seconds to 90 seconds
• Frame rate: 24fps – 60fps (30fp recommended in Sprout)

Facebook Stories

Similar to Instagram Stories, you can post Facebook Stories to extend the reach of your posts. Users who may not follow you on Instagram will be able to view and interact with your Stories.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080p
• Minimum width: 500 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 9:16 and 4:5 to 1.91:1
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4 or MOV
• Video length: 1 second to 60 seconds

Facebook Video Ad Specs

There are more than 10 million advertisers now on Facebook and having the right specs for your ads can be tricky. Each type of Facebook video ad is different, so let’s break down the specs for each type of video you can produce.

In-Feed Video Ads

These Facebook video ads are the sponsored equivalent of in-feed posts, and they follow similar guidelines to in-feed video posts.

Video guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080 minimum
• Minimum width: 120 pixels
• Minimum height: 120 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 1:1 (for desktop or mobile) or 4:5 (for mobile only)
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or GIF
• Video length: 1 seconds to 240 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fps

Character limits

• Primary text: 125 characters
• Headline: 27 characters
• Description: 27 characters

Carousel Video Ads

Facebook Carousel Video ads allow brands to showcase multiple videos (or images) and a landing page link within a user’s Facebook feed. It has grown in popularity because its unique scrolling feature allows users to see more content before clicking. In fact, Digiday estimated Carousel Ads to be 10x more effective than standard social media ads.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080 minimum
• Aspect ratio: 1:1
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or GIF
• Video length: 1 seconds to 240 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fps

Character limits

• Primary text: 125 characters
• Headline: 32 characters
• Description: 18 characters
• Landing Page URL: Required

Collection Video Ads (Mobile)

The Facebook Collection ads showcase multiple images and a main video above it. This is perfect for displaying multiple products (or various colors of a single product) plus a video. The ad type has been popular so far with retailers and clothing companies as an instant storefront or lookbook.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080 minimum
• Aspect ratio: 1:1
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or GIF
• Video length: 1 seconds to 240 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fps

Character Limits

• Primary text: 125 characters
• Headline max: 40 characters
• Landing Page URL: Required

Instant Experience Video Ads

Facebook Instant Experience ads open up a full-screen experience after the first click, which can be further customized with a variety of interactive features. This can include multiple video experiences, including features to auto-play on loop.

Video Guidelines

• Minimum width: 720 pixels
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV
• Video length: Up to 2 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fps

Slideshow Video Ad

Facebook’s Slideshow videos were built for advertisers wanting to reach audiences with slower internet connections. Instead of a regular video, slideshows are just that–a slideshow of images or video in an ad display.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 or 1:1
• Recommended video formats: MP4 or MPV
• Slideshow duration length: 15 seconds

Facebook Stories Ads

Facebook added the Stories feature – photo or short video posts that are only available for 24 hours. In addition to user-generated organic posts, Stories ads are available to run between sets of posted Stories. While most users will be sharing immediate and organic updates from their phone’s camera, the guidelines for this format are similar for both paid and organic ad posts.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080
• Minimum width: 500 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MPV and GIF
• Video length: 1 second to 2 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fps

Character Limits

• Primary text: 125 characters
• Headline: 40 characters

For more information on the video specs for Facebook, visit the Facebook Help Center.

Instagram Video Specs

Instagram launched video capabilities in 2013 and quickly saw enough success to start advertising on the platform in 2015. Since then, video only continues to grow as an engaging social format. Needless to say, Instagram videos are absolutely worth the investment.

Carousel Video

Since 2015, Instagram crafted its video formats to allow three different styles: landscape, square and vertical. However, like the app, Instagram and how video is presented has evolve. Gone are the days of IGTV and Instagram Video. Video can be natively included as a post or carousel post, or they can be uploaded as Reels, but more on Reels later.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080, 1080×1350
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV
• Video length: 3 seconds to 60 minutes
• Frame rate: 23-60 fps

Instagram Reels

Introduced in 2020, Instagram Reels are another option for your video strategy on Instagram. These short-form, easily digestible videos are becoming the preferred type of content in Instagram feeds.

Fortunately for social content creators looking to easily generate a lot of content for Instagram, most of the video specs for Instagram Reels are fairly similar to other formats on the platform.

As Instagram has started to add separate tabs for different content types, thumbnails will be cropped differently on each view. If the viewer is on the first tab that has all content types, the thumbnail will be cropped to the traditional square post size of 1:1–center your subjects and plan to avoid undesirable vertical cropping.

Video Guidelines:

• Resolution: 720p minimum
• Aspect ratio: 0.01:1 to 10:1; 9:16 recommended
• Max file size: 4GB max (1GB in Sprout)
• Recommended video formats: MP4 or MOV
• Video length: 3 seconds to 15 minutes
  • Recording in-app is limited to 90 seconds; users can upload videos up to 15 minutes
• Frame rate: 23-60 fps

Cover Photo Size:

• Size: 420p x 654p
• Aspect ratio: 1:1.55

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are short-form videos that display for 24-hours on your profile. Followers and users can access your Stories directly from your profile; followers have the luxury of accessing your Stories directly from their feed, where Stories for accounts they follow display directly at the top of their screen.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080
• Minimum width: 500 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or GIF
• Video length: 1 second to 90 seconds
• Frame rate: 23-60 fps

Character Limits

• Primary text: 125 characters

Consider leaving roughly 250 pixels of the top of the video free from text to avoid covering them with the profile icon.

Instagram Video Ad Specs

Instagram’s advertising revenue has significantly increased over the last year. In fact, Instagram reportedly earned $43.2 billion in ad revenue in 2022. The push for Instagram advertising is real and marketers have to be ready to take advantage with engaging videos.

Carousel Video Ad

Much like Facebook’s Carousel Ads, Instagram offers a similar feature. Carousel ads allow users to see more of a product or feature than a single image or video. With Instagram, your carousel video ads can have 2-10 cards with a full-width call to action below the ad.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080
• Aspect ratio: 1:1
• Max file size: 4GB (video) 30MB (image)
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or GIF
• Video length: 1 second to 2 minutes
• Number of Carousel cards: 2 (minimum) to 10 (maximum)
• Frame rate: 23-60 fps

Instagram Stories Ads

It didn’t take long for Instagram Stories to feature ads within users’ story feeds. Brands can seamlessly integrate their video content between other Instagram users’ Stories.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1080
• Minimum width: 500 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 4GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or GIF
• Video length: 1 second to 60 minutes
• Frame rate: 23-60 fps

Character Limits

• Primary text: 125 characters

Consider leaving roughly 250 pixels of the top of the video free from text to avoid covering them with the profile icon

If you’re looking for further information including images, check out our complete guide to all the Instagram ad sizes.

For more information on the video specs for Instagram, visit the Facebook Help Center.

TikTok Video Specs

TikTok has quickly gained attention in the social space. Fortunately, TikTok’s focus on easy to create and share videos means it’s not hard to start producing video content for the platform, and there are plenty of trends to inspire TikTok content creation.

TikTok In-Feed Videos

TikTok videos are all about the ease of creation, editing and sharing, so it makes sense that specs are more or less oriented around typical mobile phone dimensions. One key trait to keep in mind if you’re trying to repurpose video content across platforms is that videos uploaded from another file source, rather than recorded on the app, can be longer than 60 seconds.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1920
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 72MB (Android users) and 278.6MB (iOS users)
  • 1GB maximum in Sprout
• Recommended video formats: MP4 or MOV
• Video length: Up to 3 minutes recorded in-app or 10 minutes when uploaded from another source
• Frame rate: 23-60fps

TikTok Feed Ads

TikTok ads are a rapidly evolving opportunity for brands. The in-feed option for paid TikTok content is fairly similar to the formatting for existing organic content. To fine-tune paid content for the best performance, be sure to consult TikTok’s business center for the latest tips.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 540×960, 640×640 or 960×540
• Aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1 or 16:9
• Max file size: Up to 500MB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV, MPEG, 3PG or AVI
• Video length: 5 seconds to 60 seconds
• Bitrate: 516 kbps minimum
• Frame rate: 23-60fps

Character Limits

• Ad description: 1-100 Latin alphabet letters and 1-50 Asian characters

Twitter Video Specs

X (formerly Twitter) is a popular space to share and interact with different social media videos. For marketers, it’s all about keeping a user’s attention with enthralling and click-worthy video content. In the sports and entertainment industry, Twitter is often the go-to for sharing video content, so it’s critical to learn the correct Twitter video specs.

Twitter Landscape & Portrait Videos

Twitter provides two formats of in-feed video content to share with your followers: landscape and portrait. These specific formats are only available for uploading video directly to Twitter, rather than sharing YouTube or other links.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1280×720 (landscape), 720×1280 (portrait), 720×720 (square)
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 (landscape or portrait), 1:1 (square)
• Max file size: 512MB*
• Video length: 0.5 seconds to 140 seconds*
• Frame rate: 30fps or 60fps

*Twitter Pro Media users can upload files up to 1GB and videos up to 10 minutes.

Character Limits

• Maximum count: 280 characters.

Twitter Videos Ad Specs

Looking to promote your video through paid ads on Twitter? Luckily, you can use the same exact formats from Twitter organic videos. Stick to the same specs for both organic and paid video to ensure maximum visibility.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1280×720 (landscape), 720×1280 (portrait), 720×720 (square)
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 (landscape or portrait), 1:1 (square)
• Max file size: 512MB
• Video length: 0.5 seconds to 140 seconds
• Frame rate: 30fps or 60fps

Character Limits

• Maximum count: 280 characters.

For more information on the video specs for Twitter, visit the Twitter Help Center.

YouTube Video Specs

As the second-largest search engine behind Google, YouTube is an essential network for video content. For marketers, YouTube is a great space to promote, educate and share video content around your brand.

As YouTube continues to grow as a destination for video content, it hosts everything from short-form promotional videos to full-length movies and TV. This means users are streaming content on all sorts of devices, which could have different levels of zoom or overscan.

While there’s no hard and fast rules from the platform on how to approach the video editing concept of “title safe” areas where text like titles and subtitles aren’t cut off, you do want to avoid placing these types of visual elements right at the edges of your video area. Read on for more specifics on each format available on YouTube.

Video Player (Standard YouTube Video)

While YouTube allows users to upload various types of media formats and use plenty of different dimensions, organically, there’s truly only one format for the video player. Organic videos should all follow a 16:9 ratio, but can be uploaded 4:3. However, the smaller ratio will automatically pillarbox the sides to still make it fit in the player.

YouTube has seven recommended dimensions and ratios for standard YouTube videos:

Video Guidelines

• Resolution:
  • 4320p (8k): 7680×4320
  • 2160p (4K): 3840×2160
  • 1440p (2k): 2560×1440
  • 1080p (HD): 1920×1080
  • 720p (HD): 1280×720
  • 480p (SD): 854×480
  • 360p (SD): 640×360
  • 240p (SD): 426×240
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 default
• Max file size: 256GB or 12 hours, whichever is less (5GB max in Sprout)
• Recommended video formats: MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG4, MP4, MPG, AVI, WMV, MPEGPS, FLV, 3GPP, WebM, DNxHR, ProRes, CineForm, HEVC (h265)
• Video length: Up to 12 hours, dependent on file size
• Frame rate: 24, 25 or 30fps

YouTube Shorts

Introduced late 2020, YouTube Shorts have recently made its debut as another short-form video feature. These videos are a new way to watch, create and discover short-form content. Because people are watching more short-form videos globally, using Shorts is a new way to reach wider audiences to entertain or educate.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution:
  • 4320p (8k): 4320×7680
  • 2160p (4K): 2160×3840
  • 1440p (2k): 1440×2560
  • 1080p (HD): 1080×1920
  • 720p (HD): 720×1280
  • 480p (SD): 480×854
  • 360p (SD): 360×640
  • 240p (SD): 240×426
• Aspect ratio: 9:16 or 1:1
• Recommended video formats: MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG4, MP4, MPG, AVI, WMV, MPEGPS, FLV, 3GPP, WebM, DNxHR, ProRes, CineForm, HEVC (h265)
• Video length: Up to 60 seconds

For more information on the video specs for YouTube, visit the Google Help Center.

YouTube Video Ad Specs

Standard YouTube videos are pretty straightforward, but there are a few video ad formats to learn if you want to advertise on the network. According to data from Google, brands advertising on YouTube with Discovery ads see incremental conversions.

Skippable, Non-Skippable, Mid-Roll, Bumper Video, In-Feed Display Ads

We’ve put these five YouTube video ads specs together because in the end, they all play through the standard YouTube video player. That means all of these ad types follow the same dimensions as the non-ad videos, but only differ in video length. Let’s look at each ad type:

• Skippable Video Ad: This YouTube ad type is played before, during or after the content and becomes skippable after 5 seconds. This ad format is the only one allowing advertisers to monetize views from any viewing device.
• Non-Skippable Video Ad: This YouTube ad type is played before the content and users must watch the full 15 seconds maximum ad (can also be added during or after video).
• Mid-roll Video Ad: This YouTube ad type is played mid-view (like TV commercials) and is only available for videos 8 minutes or longer. Ads are added either manually or automatically. Mid-rolls can be skippable, but users must watch 30 seconds or the entire ad (whichever is shorter).
• Bumper Video Ads: This YouTube ad type is played before the content. This short 6-second max video cannot be skipped and is usually optimized for mobile views.
• Display Ads: These ads are shown in users’ search queries and sometimes appear in the right video column when watching a video. These ads are static, which means they don’t automatically play. However, once the video is clicked, the type of content displayed can simply follow the standard video player guidelines.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (horizontal), 1080 x 1920 (vertical), 1080 x 1080 (square)
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 (horizontal), 9:16 (vertical), 1:1 (square)
• Max file size: 256GB
• Recommended video formats: MPG
• Video length:
  • Skippable Video Ad: No maximum, but recommended 15 – 20 seconds for awareness, 2 – 3 minutes for consideration, and 15 – 20 seconds for action.
  • Non-Skippable Video Ad: 15 or 20 seconds, depending on marketing
  • Mid-roll Video Ad: 30 seconds minimum
  • Bumper Video Ad: 6 seconds maximum
  • In-Feed (Display) Video Ad: 15-20 seconds for awareness, 2-3 minutes for consideration

For more information on the video specs for YouTube, visit the Google Help Center.

LinkedIn Video Specs

With 66% of consumers finding short-form video the most engaging type of in-feed social content, LinkedIn adopted the use of video on the platform. If you’re looking to incorporate video into your LinkedIn marketing strategy, then it’s important to do it with the right specs. While some technical requirements may match other networks, there are some specs that are specific to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn In-Feed Video

While before the only video format you were able to upload was a shared video, LinkedIn has expanded its capabilities to upload your own videos into the platform.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 256×144 (min) and 4096×2304 (max)
• Aspect ratio: 1:2.4, 2.4:1
• Max file size: 5GB (5GB max in Sprout for Company and Personal Pages)
• Recommended video formats: AAC, ASF, FLV, MP3, MP4, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MKV, WebM, H264/AVC, Vorbis, VP8, VP9, WMV2, WMV3
• Video length: Up to 10 minutes
• Frame rate: 60fps
• Bitrate: Up to 30mbps

For more information on the video specs for LinkedIn, visit the LinkedIn Help Center.

LinkedIn Video Ads

As of 2018, LinkedIn now offers video ads. The requirements are a little bit different than in-feed video, so be sure to consider them when developing ads for your paid campaign.

Video Guidelines

• Recommended dimensions and resolutions:
  • Vertical (4:5): Min 360 x 450 pixels, Max 1536 x 1920 pixels
  • Vertical (9:16): Min 360 x 640 pixels, Max 1080 x 1920 pixels
  • Landscape (16:9): Min 640 x 360 pixels, Max 1920 x 1080 pixels
  • Square (1:1): Min 360 x 360 pixels, Max 1920 x 1920 pixels
• Aspect ratio:
  • Vertical: 4:5, 9:16
  • Landscape: 16:9
  • Square: 1:1
• Max file size: 200MB
• Recommended video formats: MP4
• Video length: 3 seconds to 30 minutes
• Frame rate: 30fps

Character Limits

• Ad name: 255 characters
• Headline: 70 characters recommended; 200 characters maximum
• Introductory text: 150 characters recommended; 600 characters maximum

For more information on the video specs for LinkedIn ads, visit LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Help.

Pinterest Promoted Video Specs

Pinterest allows video upload for business accounts only, so they have specs designed for brands to get the most out of the highly visual and inspirational lifestyle content frequently shared on the platform.

Shared Video Pins and Standard Width Video Ads

In addition to ads, Pinterest Business Accounts can upload organic video content. There are two formats: standard and max width video. Below are the dimensions for standard width video ads and standard Pins.

Video Guidelines

• Aspect ratio: 1:1, 2:3, 4:5, 9:16
• Max file size: 2GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or M4V
• Video length: 4 seconds to 15 minutes

Character Limits

• Title: Up to 100 characters
• Description: Up to 500 characters

Max Width Video Ads

Pinterest allows you to publish standard width and maximum width video ads. Maximum width videos expand across mobile users’ entire screens. These specs apply only to maximum width video ads; standard video ad specs can be found above. Note that maximum width video ads are only paid ads.

Video Guidelines

• Aspect ratio: 1:1
• Max file size: 2GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4, MOV or M4V
• Video length: 4 seconds to 15 minutes

Character Limits

• Title: Up to 100 characters
• Description: Up to 500 characters

For more information on the video specs for Pinterest ads, visit Pinterest Business Help.

Snapchat Video Specs

Snapchat is still an active network for younger generations to share video content. Whether it’s through FOMO-inducing filters, Snapchat is a hotbed for video sharing.

Single Videos and Single Video Ad

This video format is the most common across the channel and is the main way users communicate back and forth through the app. However, your business can post videos to its story so others can see what your business is up to. Just follow these specs:

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1920
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 1GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4 or MOV
• Video length: 3 seconds to 180 seconds

Character Limits

• Brand: 25 characters
• Headline: 34 characters

Long-Form Story Video Ad

Snapchat currently offers one main video format for ads, which is known as the Story Ad. However, the Snapchat Story Video Ad is what users see in between viewing users’ Stories.

Video Guidelines

• Resolution: 1080×1920
• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max file size: 1GB
• Recommended video formats: MP4 or MOV
• Video length: 3 seconds to 180 seconds

Character Limits

• Brand: 25 characters
• Headline: 34 characters

For more information on the video specs for Snapchat, visit the Snapchat Ads Help Center.

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The post Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Video Specs appeared first on Sprout Social.

Pinterest isn’t slowing down. In fact, it’s one of the fastest-growing social platforms. And with 85% of weekly users saying they’ve purchased something from a Pin, this platform deserves to be in your social media marketing stack. Let’s get into how to market on Pinterest.

What is Pinterest marketing?

Pinterest marketing is the practice of posting branded content on this visual-forward platform to cultivate and build awareness, connect with your audience and drive traffic to your website.

Since many are looking for buying inspiration, marketing on Pinterest is a powerful way to reach new customers.

Benefits of marketing on Pinterest

Adding another platform to the mix is no easy ask. But using Pinterest comes with benefits that make it worth the additional effort. To name a few:

Boost brand awareness

Every month 460 million people use the platform, so there’s an active audience waiting for you. Crumbl Cookies discovered this recently: In less than a year, they grew their Pinterest following from 7,000 to 1 million.

Drive people to your website

Pinterest is a popular discovery platform for shoppers looking for inspiration or new products. In fact, 80% of weekly users have discovered a new product or brand on Pinterest, according to the platform.

And Pinterest knows this. That’s why they’ve optimized unique Pin types that can be used to promote products and articles. This type of content is a powerful tool for driving new users and customers to your website.

Create and expand your community

Pinterest is a prime place to create and cultivate an engaged community through content—specifically content that taps into creativity. According to Pinterest, 85% of Pinners say they go to the platform to start a new project. Offering content that taps into this provides Pinners with the spark they’re looking for.

And that brings us to a superpower Pinterest has: It makes people feel good.

According to the platform, 78% of weekly Pinners feel positive after interacting with it. So Pinterest is a prime spot for you to create feel-good and helpful moments for your audience.

(Source: Pinterest)

Learn more about other vital Pinterest statistics to prepare for creating a Pinterest marketing strategy.

Your 6-step Pinterest marketing strategy

Now let’s get into how to market on Pinterest by creating a strategy in 6 steps:

1. 1. Brand your profile
   2. Develop your Pinterest strategy
   3. Engage with the community
   4. Focus on Pinterest SEO
   5. Schedule fresh Pins
   6. Measure what works

1. Brand your profile

The first step to having a presence on any social media network is to brand your profile. Before you get started, double check that you have a business Pinterest account—not personal. This gives you access to additional tools like analytics and ads.

Then, brand your Pinterest profile so that it’s easily recognizable as belonging to your company. Here are a few ways to do that:

Customize your profile visuals

Your profile visuals are prime real estate to enforce your branding. Just make sure your visuals are high-quality and match your brand to give your profile a branded look.

There are two main profile areas you’ll want to brand: your profile photo and cover.

Profile photo

Upload a profile photo that best represents your business. This is likely just your logo set into a 165 x 165 pixel image.

Cover

Your cover is the perfect place to add graphics, product shots, an image of your office, seasonal imagery and other visuals that represent your company.

For example, Free People’s cover features seasonal clothing.

IKEA’s cover is a stunning photo featuring their products and decor.

And some brands, like Anthropologie and Nordstrom, keep it simple with tone-setting art or their full logo.

Write your bio

Your social media bios should be consistent across platforms. Most have a similar character limit (Pinterest’s is 160), making it easy to write one bio and use it across the board.

Hashtags aren’t essential for your Pinterest bio, but you should clearly and succinctly communicate your brand’s mission statement and offerings. And try to naturally include relevant keywords—more on keywords later.

Brand your board covers

Choose covers for your Pinterest boards so they match your branding and the rest of your profile.

There are a couple of different ways you can do this. First, you can create and upload separate board covers to each board and link them to your website.

You can also simply choose a Pin from each of your boards as a cover. To give your boards a cohesive look, choose an image for each cover with a similar theme—like the teal colors in Sprout’s boards.

Verify your website

Last but not least, you’ll want to claim your website. This gives you access to Pinterest analytics for your website and turns on the Rich Pins feature that shares more information about your link, whether it’s an article, product or recipe.

To verify your website, Pinterest will provide you with a code snippet that you’ll need to place on your site. There are WordPress plugins that can help, or your developer can handle it for you.

2. Develop a Pinterest strategy for your content

Just like any other social platform, you need to post regularly, and intentionally. That’s why you need a Pinterest marketing strategy for your content.

What types of content will you be sharing on Pinterest? How often? Will you change your content and profile elements seasonally?

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you work out your Pinterest strategy, and some Pinterest content tips:

Decide on your content types and themes

There are many different types of content that perform well on the platform like product Pins, infographics or blog posts. And now that all Pins can have links, the opportunities are endless. But what you post will depend on what makes sense for your brand.

Image Pins

This is a single-image post, and probably what you immediately picture when you think of the Pinterest feed.

Simple and straightforward, these fit well with Pinterest’s highly visual platform and you can get creative with how you use them. Think: graphics to tease a linked blog post, interesting vertical infographics, product or lifestyle imagery and user-generated content.

Video Pins

We live in a video-first world, and Pinterest is no exception. Create Video Pins featuring one or several videos. Similar to Reels or TikTok, you can add interactive elements, like stickers, text and tunes.

You don’t have to start from square one. Consider re-using clips or videos you’ve posted on Reels, TikTok or even your Stories. And don’t overthink it: Videos can be as simple as behind-the-scenes looks, customer testimonials, employee spotlights and product demos. Or, partner with creators to create unique video content.

Idea Pins

Idea Pins allow you to include multiple videos (up to five minutes) or photos together in one Pin. They’re like a combination of Stories and carousels.

Use this format for in-depth storytelling, how-tos, broken-down listicles and more—perfect for those using Pinterest to start a new project.

Once created, your Idea Pins will appear on your boards. But they’ll also show up in a “Created” tab, where all of your Idea Pins will live in a featured hub.

Product Pins

If your business is a retailer or an online store, Pinterest is the perfect place to share stunning product photos to help shoppers envision how they would use or style them.

Pinterest is a major discovery engine for shopping. Over half of Pinners see Pinterest as a place to shop. Sharing your products on this platform makes it easy for shoppers to buy straight from Pinterest, or drive traffic directly to your product pages.

Start selling on Pinterest by making shoppable gift guides with linked products, or a virtual lookbook featuring 2-5 products in Carousel Pins. Or, tap into AR with Try On product Pins, which let users virtually try on your products on their phone.

Rich Pins

Rich Pins offer more information to you as a marketer, and to your audience.

They pull information from your website into Pins—for example, if the price of a product changes on your website, it changes in the Rich Pin as well. To use them, you’ll need to apply for them and to add a code to your website.

There are three types of Rich Pins you can use: recipe Rich Pins, article Pins and product Pins.

Track trends

It’s always ideal to stay ahead of trends and adopt them early. Enter Pinterest Trends dashboard.

At the time this article was updated, Summer nails, festival, home outdoor and summer outfits 2023 were all in the top 7 trends—invaluable information to inform seasonal campaigns. Keeping track of what keywords people are searching for more, or less, is crucial for creating proactive content that taps into what audiences are looking for. This is also helpful for shaping what keywords you include in your topics and Pins.

Consider using Pinterest ads

Marketing on Pinterest doesn’t mean you need a paid strategy. But investing in Pinterest ads is a way to boost brand awareness as you grow on the platform.

Pinterest advertising also brings more bang for your buck. According to Pinterest, brands see about 2.3x more efficient cost per conversion on Pinterest compared to other social platforms.

There are a number of creative formats to leverage, from cinematic Pins, to promoted carousel Pins and paid partnership Idea Pins.

3. Engage with the community

On the content front, ‘engaging with the community’ means creating Pins that inspire people to comment, or simply to click through a carousel or Idea Pin.

But it also means responding to Pinners when they comment on your content—don’t leave your audience hanging.

You can also cultivate a community by joining and creating group boards that users contribute to, which gets your content in front of new audiences.

Search for prominent Pinners in your niche and check to see if they have group boards relevant to your industry. Many users will include rules or a link to apply to join a board within the board’s description. Once you join, remain active within those boards, pinning your content and also curating other entries so you’re not only promoting your business.

And if you want to create group boards, there are plenty of safeguards you can put in place. You have the power to assign collaborators, set parameters for what they can do, create notes containing rules and remove anyone who violates them.

4. Focus on Pinterest SEO

Pinterest is essentially a visual search engine built for discovery—in fact, nearly all searches on Pinterest are unbranded. Focus on your Pinterest SEO and implement these rules on your profile to see your ranking increase.

Do some keyword research on Pinterest to find search terms related to your product, industry and trending content. The Pinterest trends page mentioned earlier is a great place to identify search keywords that are on the rise.

But simply searching on Pinterest will help you identify related keywords people are using. In the example below, notice the suggested search terms for the keyword “diy plant hanger.” If I created a Pin about a DIY macrame plant hanger, I might also include “Easy DIY plant hanger” and “Macrame tutorial” in my Pin to capture related searches.

There are three different places where you need to be focusing on your keyword usage:

• Your profile: Add keywords to your name and bio to help your profile appear in search results. You have 65 characters to fill out your Pinterest name and 160 characters to write your bio. Include the most popular keywords in your industry.
• Your boards: Notice how Crumbl’s board titles below include keywords people are likely searching for. Like “Mood boards,” “gift ideas” and “Halloween costume ideas.” You also want to add board descriptions that tell users what they can find on the board and include your main and secondary keywords.

• Your Pins: Include relevant keywords about your pin within both the title and description. This tells users and the Pinterest algorithm what your Pin is about and helps it show up in search results. Avoid “keyword stuffing,” i.e. unnaturally filling the description with tons of keywords. In this example from Crumbl Cookies, the Pin title “End of the school year teacher gift ideas” is informative but also includes search-friendly keywords like “teacher gift ideas.”

5. Schedule fresh Pins

Continuously sharing fresh content improves the quality of your Pinterest profile, furthering the likelihood that the algorithm will share your content in search results.

While you could jump on Pinterest throughout the day everyday to share new Pins, who has time for that?

Using Sprout Social’s Pinterest management tools, schedule your content on the platform ahead of time and fill out your content calendar across multiple social networks. With our Publishing features, create and schedule Pins to various boards—or platforms. Simply upload your image(s), add the link, create your pin description and schedule.

Publishing content at your best times to post for the most engagement is another benefit of scheduling. Sprout’s Optimal Send Times feature suggests seven optimal posting times. These suggestions are based on engagement factors, helping you reach your audience with less guesswork.

6. Measure what works

Regularly analyzing your Pinterest data is the best way to iterate on your strategy by understanding what content works.

Pinterest offers Pin metrics for business accounts, including video metrics. But a data automation tool like Sprout gives you a 360-degree view of how all of your social channels are performing in one centralized hub.

Sprout’s Pinterest Profiles report gives you an overview of how your profiles are performing when it comes to metrics like impressions and follower growth—especially helpful if you have multiple profiles you want to compare. And these reports are presentation-ready and easy to share with other stakeholders.

Get started with Pinterest marketing

It’s never too late to start marketing on Pinterest. You have an audience on the platform, waiting for you to join and start sharing your creative content.

Use this 6-step strategy to kick off your Pinterest marketing. And once you’re up and running, check out Sprout’s article about Pinterest analytics to measure your success.

The post The complete guide to Pinterest Marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

Throughout this article, we’ll cover how to create your own Pinterest business account, use it strategically to promote your business, best practices and more.

Let’s dive in.

• How to create a Pinterest business account
• How to use Pinterest for business
• 5 Tips for using Pinterest for business

How to create a Pinterest business account

Creating a Pinterest business account gives you access to the necessary tools for running a successful brand social media platform and there are a number of benefits for doing so.

While a personal Pinterest account still allows you to create up to 2,000 boards, create as many as 200,000 Pins and more, you won’t be able to see performance insights or run ads unless you have a business account.

Luckily, creating a Pinterest business account is extremely easy. And if you already have a personal Pinterest account, you can easily convert your personal account over to a business account. Or, if you want to keep your accounts separate, you can simply create a linked Pinterest business account and switch back and forth between the two.

How to create a Pinterest business account

To create a brand new Pinterest account that isn’t linked to an existing personal account, follow these steps:

1. Head over to business.pinterest.com and click the Sign up button in the top right corner

2. Input your business email address, preferred password and age, then click Create account

3. Fill out the Build your profile fields and click Next

4. Next, fill out the Describe your business section and click Next

5. Select whether you want to run Pinterest ads or not (trust us, you do) and click Next

6. Then, choose where you want to start or click the X to head to your Pinterest profile and start saving Pins

How to create a linked Pinterest business account

If you want to create a separate Pinterest business account and want to link it to your personal account, follow these steps:

1. Log into your personal Pinterest account and click the down arrow next to your name

2. Click Add account from the dropdown menu

3. Click the Create button under the option to Create a free business account

4. Then follow steps 3–7 above, under How to create a new Pinterest business account

How to convert your personal account into a Pinterest business account

If you want to convert your existing personal account into a business account, follow these steps:

1. Log into your personal Pinterest account and click the down arrow next to your name

2. Head to Settings, then to the Account Management tab

3. Click Convert account next to where it says Convert to a business account (as you can see below, mine has already been converted—you can easily go back and forth if you change your mind)

4. Follow steps 3–7 above, under How to create a new Pinterest business account

How to use Pinterest for business

Now that you know how to create your own Pinterest business account let’s dig into some of the basics of using Pinterest for business.

1. Start creating your own pins

The bread and butter of Pinterest is creating your own Pins. There are a few ways to create your own Pins.

First, start by creating new Pinterest boards. You may want to create pinboards for each of the different products you offer, for various industry topics or topics relevant to the services you provide.

Here’s an example of my own Pinterest business account boards. As a social media and digital marketing writer, my pinboards are all related to various areas of the marketing industry.

Consider what types of pinboards make sense for your brand and start creating them. You can also take a look at competitors or brands in a similar industry to see what they’ve done.

Once you’ve created a new board, open it up and then click the More ideas button towards the top. Here, you can bulk up your Pinterest board with some ideas, images and links that already exist on the platform.

However, if you’re creating boards that you only want your own products or blog posts to exist in, you’ll need to create a new Pin from scratch. There are two different ways to do this.

How to create a Pin on Pinterest

First, click the Create dropdown on Pinterest and select Create Pin.

Then you’ll be taken to a screen where you can add in all of the details of your Pin.

You’ll need to:

• Select the board you want to publish the Pin to (you can also click Create board to create a new one while you’re here)
• Give your Pin a title and description
• Add alt text for accessibility
• Add a link for where your pin will lead
• Upload an image or video
• Choose to publish or schedule your Pin (more on Pin scheduling shortly)

How to create a Pin from your website

The next way to save Pins is to do so directly from your website. You can either download the Pinterest Chrome extension or add the ability to save Pins directly on your website (more on this in the next section).

With the Pinterest Chrome extension, the “Save” option will appear anytime you hover your mouse over an image on a website. Click the button, then choose the board you want to save it to.

Then head over to your profile to make any adjustments you need to make to the Pin title and descriptions—especially to add additional keywords for better search opportunity.

2. Optimize your pins for Pinterest SEO

Pinterest is a visual search engine, which means you need to be conscious of keywords when creating your Pinterest profile and when saving Pins. Just like regular SEO, you don’t want to keyword stuff. Instead, include some of the more prominent keywords that people use to search for your products within your bio, Pin descriptions and board descriptions.

The areas of your Pinterest profile, pinboards and Pins that should be optimized include your:

• Pinterest name: Mine is “Chloe West | Social Media & Digital Marketing Tips” to include what I do. Niche photography group The Simply Elegant Group chose to title their profile as “The Simply Elegant Group | Destination Wedding Planners.”
• Pinterest bio: Include a few top-level keywords (like your industry or product-line) within your bio to explain what you do.
  
• Pinterest board titles: Don’t be vague with your titles. Instead, create clear-cut board titles that let users and the Pinterest algorithm know what it’s about.
• Pinterest board descriptions: When creating your pinboard, insert a few board-specific keywords into the board description to explain what types of Pins will live there.
• Pin titles: Include straightforward titles to your Pins. This might be a blog post name or a product name.
• Pin descriptions: Help people find your Pins by writing clear descriptions that include popular search phrases.

3. Schedule Pins ahead of time

As we’ve seen, Pinterest now has its own scheduling capabilities if you create a Pin on their website. However, you can also easily schedule Pins with a tool such as Sprout Social, all while also scheduling your other social media content. This makes managing all your social profiles, including Pinterest, even more streamlined.

By scheduling your Pinterest content, you can maintain a consistent publishing schedule for your Pins, regardless of whether you’re online or not. This allows you to schedule an entire week’s content at once, rather than logging into Pinterest each day.

4. Keep an eye on your Pin performance

Pinterest business accounts come with the ability to view overall account and Pin performance. This helps you gauge how many people you’re reaching and how much traffic you’re sending to your website from your Pinterest account.

Once you’ve verified your website, you can also view the performance of your  individual Pins, making sure that they’re resonating with your audience as much as other Pins you may have saved.

You can also keep track of Pin performance based on a number of different metrics, from impressions and engagements to clicks and saves.

5. Promote Pins to reach a larger audience

Pinterest also has its own advertising platform so that you can promote certain Pins, products, blog posts, lead magnets and more. Click Ads in the top navigation menu then select Create ad from the dropdown to get to the ads manager.

This walks you through setting your objective, choosing your audience, budget and more. But if you’re looking for a more simple ads setup, you can click the Switch to 3-step ad creation button in the top right to select an already-existing pin to promote.

5 Tips for using Pinterest for business

Want to get the most out of Pinterest for your business? We’ve put together five best practices to help you jumpstart your pinning journey.

1. Optimize your Pinterest profile

While it takes just seconds to set up your business profile on Pinterest, the work doesn’t stop there. When people look at your profile, they should be able to get a clear idea of what your brand is all about and what kind of content they can expect from you.

So if you’re going to leverage Pinterest for business, start by optimizing your profile to accurately reflect your brand image. This includes:

• Having a distinct company logo in your profile picture and optimizing it according to the Pinterest size guidelines
• Creating an eye-catching cover photo that reflects your brand style
• Writing a description that accurately defines your brand and what your followers should expect
• Including your business name in the unique URL
• Highlighting a few of your best boards as “Featured boards” to give people a glimpse of what you have to offer.

Here’s an example from Anthropologie who does all of this really well. First, they uploaded an on-brand cover image, verified their profile and put together a relevant bio.

On Pinterest, brands don’t need to shy away from the fact that they are brands on the platform – users frequently shop, research and engage with brand content that provides value.

Anthropologie is noted for its signature visual style, and that’s carried through all elements of its Pinterest profile. The brand’s boards highlight a mix of product imagery alongside more hands-on content like food and drink recipes, tie into their tagline’s stated mission of “style, beauty and home.” And they even have branded board covers that fully tie their profile together.

If you want to go in-depth on how to set up your Pinterest profile’s branding for success, check out our easy-to-follow 5-step Pinterest marketing guide.

2. Develop a powerful content strategy

If you’re using Pinterest for business, you can’t drop link, post images and hope for the best. It’s crucial to have a specific idea of what types of content and images you should create to win over your audience, and develop a content strategy accordingly.

Once you have your goals set up, you’ll be able to start developing a content strategy geared toward those goals. What type of content will help you fulfill your purpose? And what kind of content does your audience expect from you?

While there are a ton of options, the following types of images should form the cornerstones of the Pinterest content strategy for your business:

Eye-catching imagery

Just like Instagram, Pinterest too is a visual platform. So images that pop and instantly catch the eye should be the essence of your strategy. Color-coordinated images and high-definition photos are a few examples. Check out this pin from Birchbox, where the rich colors of the featured products from Tocca echo the luxe design of the surroundings.

Instructional content

Educational content is the life force of Pinterest. In fact, 85% of Pinners say they go to Pinterest to start new projects. So make sure your content strategy includes instructional visual content that helps people learn how to do something such as how-to’s, tips and DIYs.Real Simple regularly shares recipes and tips to help its followers learn new things at a glance with visually appealing infographics.

Content that inspires

People also turn to Pinterest to get inspired. Give your followers a regular dose of visual inspiration that’s relevant to your industry–whether it’s motivational quotes or wedding décor ideas. Apartment Therapy has created several boards to provide home décor inspiration to its followers.

Informational content

Informational content is another way for you to engage your Pinterest audience. Create infographics and factoids that will help people learn new facts and figures relevant to your industry, products or services.

3. Create Pins that stand out

While eye-catching imagery should be a vital element in your Pinterest for business content strategy, it’s a bit challenging to create them.

If you want to create more visually compelling Pins, make sure you follow the creative best practices from Pinterest. These Pinterest best practices include:

• Maintaining a 2:3 aspect ratio (for example, 1000 x 1500 pixels)
• Including your brand logo
• Adding text overlay with concise, targeted copy to tell better stories
• Choosing images that show context – this includes showing a product or service in a lifestyle setting or showing a use case in action that brings it to life.

4. Publish at the best time for increased engagement

Like with every other social media platform, timing is everything on Pinterest. However, unlike some super fast-moving platforms like Instagram, the visual content you’ve put so much effort in can have a much longer shelf life on Pinterest.

Seasonal and occasion-related content is huge on Pinterest, with plenty of ways to source ideas for everything from recipes to decor. Seasonality on Pinterest shows that many Pinners start engaging with occasions months in advance – such as summer-themed Pins gaining traction in early spring, and winter holiday Pins are saved starting in June.

As with almost any form of content, though, posting at the optimal time to get in front of an active audience can help your Pinterest content get off to a running start. Sprout’s ViralPost technology is available for Pinterest posts, using your own account’s data about your historical top times for engagement to suggest the best times for future posts.

After you start publishing on Pinterest, you can start analyzing your post performance at different hours and on different days of the week. Use Sprout’s Pinterest integration to see how your content is performing and continue to refine a posting strategy that works specifically for your brand.

5. Add Pinterest save buttons to your website

Regardless of the Pinterest goals for your business, you should encourage more people to save your content to their boards. This not only helps more Pinners learn about your brand, but also compels more people to visit your site and buy your products.

One of Pinterest’s best practices is to add save buttons to your site so Pinterest users save ideas and images to their pinboards in just one click.

Use the Pinterest Widget Builder to create suitable save buttons to add to your site.

Pottery Barn allows you to easily save their products to your pinboard using a save button. It’s underneath their product photos, allowing interested customers to save this to a board before they decide to buy.

Create your own Pinterest business account today

The post 9 clever ways to maximize the value of Pinterest for business appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this guide, we’ll explain how to interpret Pinterest analytics, best practices for increasing your reach among Pinterest users and the key terms you need to know.

Pinterest analytics requirements

To start off, you need to make sure your Pinterest account is a business account. It’s a fast and easy process. With a business account, you can access Pinterest analytics and set up ad campaigns.

Next, claim your website. Once you do that, your Pinterest profile will display a small globe icon next to your URL, verifying your identity. You’ll also be able to see analytics for Pins that users create from your website, and those Pins will include your profile photo and a “follow” button.

You can claim your website in one of three ways:

• Add an HTML tag to your website.
• Download Pinterest’s HTML file and upload it to your site.
• Add a TXT record to your domain name system (DNS).

When Pinterest users save a Pin from your claimed website, your profile photo appears as subtle branding.

Creating a business account and claiming your website are the two essential steps for gaining access to your analytics and key metrics. You can also:

• Install a save button so users can easily Pin from your website. It’ll also generate analytics on which Pins send you referral traffic from Pinterest.
• Add a Pinterest tag to measure actions someone takes after seeing your promoted Pins (paid ads).
• Add Rich Pins for your products, articles and apps. These provide a little more information in the Pin when a user Pins from your site.

Pinterest analytics terminology

Pinterest analytics terminology is similar to that of other networks. If you’re already working with Facebook and Twitter reports, these Pinterest terms should feel familiar.

Profile overview

In native Pinterest analytics, you’ll see statistics like impressions and viewers. Pinterest Impressions are the number of times one of your Pins shows up in a feed, search results or category results. Viewers are the number of people who have seen at least one of your Pins.

Looking at both the viewers and impressions helps you understand how engaged your audience is. If your Pins have a lot of views but few impressions, that could mean you need to improve your SEO to ensure your Pins show up in search results.

Another helpful feature of Pinterest’s native analytics is the Boards with top Pin impressions. This table gives you information on which boards are performing well, which will help you understand what to focus on. If you’re constantly posting on one board but finding that the Pins are not resonating, then it might be time to cut your losses on the board or adjust your Pinterest strategy.

Audience growth

Pinterest uses “followers” as Twitter does. A new follower is someone who follows your account, not just one of your boards. Pinterest will notify you anytime someone follows you or your boards.

In Sprout Social, your Smart Inbox will tell you when you have new comments and posts, and the Sprout Pinterest Profiles Report will show your audience growth for the reporting period you define.

The Pinterest Profiles Report includes data on followers and overall pin performance. When you’re looking at your audience growth, these metrics can reveal how well your content is performing. Are your Pins engaging enough to earn a follow? Is your brand keeping track of top-performing content?

Publishing

The Sprout Pinterest Profiles report provides an overview of how consistently you Pin on the network, your Pins Sent and your Average Pins Per Day. If you see gaps in your publishing or notice that you Pin more often on some days you may need to reevaluate your strategy.

Pinterest strategy is a long game for brands, and you’ll need to post consistently for the best results.

To do this, use a feature like Sprout’s Publishing Calendar to schedule your posts. Collect or create your Pins, then schedule them out so you don’t have to worry about timing. Your scheduled Pins will show up next to all of your other network posts, giving you a great overview of your content calendar.

Sprout’s scheduling feature lets you either select post times or automate post timing with ViralPost. If you choose ViralPost, the software will schedule the posts at times that historically have the highest engagement. This proprietary feature learns as you post, so the more you post, the more it understands when your audience is around.

Individual Pin analytics

Pinterest provides several metrics that help you analyze the performance of your individual Pins.

The individual Pins (Message Type) are categorized as either Pins or Saves.

In your account, they all display as Pins, but how they got there is what differentiates them:

• Pins are original — you scheduled them, uploaded them natively or created them from a website.
• Saves are someone else’s Pin that you saved to your own board.

For each Pin or save, you can see the number of user comments, saves and clicks. A click is when a user opens your Pin and/or clicks through to the linked website from the Pin. Your top Pins are those with a high number of saves or clicks.

Website Pins

Once you’ve claimed your website, you can see what content users are saving to Pinterest.

In the Website section of your native analytics, you’ll find some helpful charts that rank top Pins originating from your website by impressions, saves and clicks.

Identifying your most popular Pins can help you determine how to fine-tune your Pinterest strategy. In your Pinterest dashboard, click on the All-time category to see your Power Pins—or Pins that have a high number of saves, clicks and repins.

Audience insights

The key to understanding what resonates with your audience is knowing already who you’re marketing to. It’s not enough to know who the average user on Pinterest is, though it’s helpful if you’re just starting out on the platform.

The Audience Insights page on Pinterest gives you a glimpse into your own audience and Pinterest’s overall audience. There’s also a helpful comparison tool to assist you in benchmarking your audience. You can look at categories and interests to see relevant keywords. For example, the “food and drink” category also shows how many are interested in snack mix recipes and sweets.

Additional audience demographic information includes age, gender, location (by metro area and country) and device. Use this information to your advantage by creating Pins for the categories that appeal to your audience. The sub-interest breakdowns also help you find keywords to use in your Pins and in your advertising strategy.

Every audience category has an affinity score, which indicates how interested your audience is in the topic compared to the rest of Pinterest. A high-affinity score means that your Pins on that topic are resonating with that audience.

Ramp up your marketing with Pinterest analytics

With roughly 430 million monthly average users, Pinterest could become an important part of your social media campaigns—as long as you understand Pinterest analytics.

Pinterest analytics will give you insight into what type of content is working well, so you can create more of it. The website analytics also give you information on what parts of your site’s content viewers are finding most useful. The lessons you learn from Pinterest may also help you optimize your strategies on other social platforms.

Stay ahead of the competition. Sign up for a free, 30-day trial to start scheduling your posts and measuring performance with Sprout today.

The post Pinterest analytics: a guide for marketers appeared first on Sprout Social.

In Q3 2021, Pinterest reported 444 million monthly active users (MAUs) and a potential advertising audience of 233 million. Other important Pinterest demographics and statistics to know include:

• 60% of users are women
• Pinners spend 80% more in retail than non-Pinners
• Almost 80% of US Millennial women and 40% of US Millennial men are on Pinterest
• Millennial users as a group are up 35% year over year
• 45% of people in the US with a household income over $100K are on Pinterest
• 80% of weekly Pinners have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest

With these stats in mind, advertising on Pinterest seems like a no-brainer.

Learn how to get started on Pinterest ads:

• Pinterest ad types
• What are rich pins?
• 5 steps for creating a Pinterest ad
• How to measure Pinterest ad results
• 3 tips on creating a successful Pinterest ad

Pinterest ad types

Pinterest offers a number of different ad types to cater to various brand needs. It’s important to understand what each Pinterest ad type is so you can make an informed decision on which is best for your brand.

Promoted Pins

A Promoted Pin is just like a regular Pin, except you can pay to have it promoted and seen to your target Pinterest audience. It shows up as a natural part of the home feed.

The most noticeable difference between a Promoted Pin and a regular pin is that Promoted Pins say “Promoted” at the bottom:

One advantage of Promoted Pins is that the “Promoted” mark disappears when someone saves it to their board. More importantly, the views associated with that organic Pin are not counted towards your advertising costs.

Promoted Video Pins

Promoted Video Pins are simply Promoted Pins that feature a video instead of a static image. They play automatically when viewed from a user’s feed.

One-tap Pins

When users click on regular Pins, they are shown a “close up” image with more details.

But with One-tap Pins, a click takes you immediately to a website or landing page. This is a great way to increase web traffic or drive users to purchase pages for your products.

It’s easier to find one-tap Pins on Pinterest on desktop rather than in-app. You’ll notice that either your cursor displays as a hand instead of a magnifying glass as with regular Pins or you’ll see a link as an overlay. In the above example, the click leads to the homepage of a wine label. Alternatively, you can use a specific landing page or blog post that matches the Pin title and image.

Pay attention to branding with One-tap Pins. Keeping things uniform and seamless between the Pin and the destination URL will increase your conversions. A few ways you can create consistent branding are by:

• Using similar language in your ad that you use on the landing page or product page
• Using similarly styled images such as lighting, coloring, filters, etc.

Your goal is to make your Pinterest ad and website look seamless – the same company and brand – so that your prospects will trust they’re viewing the same brand when they’re on your product page.

Promoted App Pins

Promoted App Pins are great for developers or app companies that want to drive ad traffic to download an app. Instead of directing users to a website, Promoted App Pins open up your app for download in the Apple or Android store. These Pins pair with the “App Install” campaign objective.

Cinematic Pins

Cinematic Pins are similar to Video Pins because they’re moving pictures. Rather than an auto-play video Pin, this mobile Pinterest ad type only moves as a user is scrolling and will move at the speed a user is scrolling. Cinematic Pins will also stop when a user stops scrolling.

Promoted carousel Pins

Promoted carousel Pins are a set of standard Pins that you can swipe through. These work well if you want to show as much information as possible in your ad but not have it all stuffed into one image. It’s important to note that if you promote your carousel Pins, the reporting impressions and charges for impressions will be counted as one, not per swipe.

Carousel ads are perfect for displaying multiple products in a collection, short how-to guides and idea lists. Keep in mind that you’re limited to 2-5 images in the set.

Idea Pins with paid partnerships

Previously known as Story Pins and still rolling out as a new feature, Idea Pins are a set of 1-20 images, videos or text that Pinners can tap through. They operate very similarly to other platforms’ Stories. These are often used to tell a story in a way that a carousel Pin or short video cannot.

Currently, Idea Pins are not available to be promoted but they are available in Pinterest ads as a paid partnership with a creator. A “Paid Partnership” label will appear on the ad and it’ll appear with the creator’s profile image. You’ll need to work together with an approved creator to have this ad type. You’re also welcome to create organic Idea Pins to try out the new format.

Collections ad

Collections Pins are a new ad format on Pinterest and are one of the ways that the company is investing in a more robust social commerce experience for consumers. To create a Collections ad, you’ll need to first either manually create the collection or select ones from an uploaded catalog.

These ads feature one large hero asset and when selected, up to 24 smaller secondary creative assets appear below. The hero creative can be either a photo or a video and secondary creatives are able to be linked to product URLs. Think of Collections ads as a shoppable catalog as Pins.

What are rich pins?

Just like Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, Pinterest also offers a website tracking Pixel. This snippet of code will allow you to fine-tune your Pinterest Ads audience and zone in on your followers’ demographics a bit better.

A web developer can add specific code to the appropriate place on your website. Once the snippet is in the backend of your site, it will collect data about your website visitor behavior. This offers you a chance to show ads to your website visitors.

Rich Pins are named such because they give more information than regular Pins. They’re available to anyone using Pinterest and do require you to have the appropriate rich meta tags for the type of Rich Pin you want. You’ll also need to apply to use them to make sure they’re working properly.

Types of Rich Pins

Pinterest occasionally changes the types of Rich Pins offered and you can find a step-by-step of how to install each type here. Rich pins can be promoted just like an ad or you can simply post organic ones. Either way – they’re extremely useful as they provide your followers with more information about your product or service directly on the Pin.

Product Pins: Product Pins are perfect for featuring a product because they give the user relevant buying information right on the Pin, including price and where to buy. If you have a catalog uploaded, you’ll be able to tag a product category that when clicked, shows Pinners all items of that category without leaving the app.

Article Pins: These Pins showcase blurbs about a blog post or story. These are great for directing traffic to your blog or publication. In the home feed, your profile photo and name will show up under the title.

App Install Pins: These Pins allow users to download your app directly from the App Store or Play Store. It’s similar to an App Install ad – the difference being that your users will get a bit more information directly on the Pin, and also, you can opt to run this type of Rich Pin organically.

Recipe Pins: This type of Rich Pin displays ingredients and cook time so that people can follow along right from your post.

Posting Rich Pins

Once you’ve got the code embedded in your site and your website is approved by Pinterest, you’re ready to post Rich Pins. To test out if your Rich Pins are working, Pinterest offers a Rich Pins Validator. If you update your article or recipe on your site, any associated Rich Pins will also reflect the changes.

How to advertise on Pinterest in 5 steps

Now that you’re familiar with Rich Pins and ads types available to you, it’s time to learn how to actually set up your Pinterest ad.

First, you’ll need to check that ads are available in your country and that you have the appropriate requirements. These requirements include having a Pinterest Business account, using content that you own and have destination URLs attached to the ads.

1. Sign up for a Pinterest Business account

Besides being a requirement for running ads, having a Pinterest Business account offers benefits like spotting emerging trends and driving website traffic. It’s easy to set one up, link an existing personal account or convert a personal Pinterest account to business.

2. Select campaign objective

After navigating to the Pinterest Ads Manager, you’ll be guided to set up your ad. There are several campaign objectives available to you based on which marketing funnel stage you want to target. Whether it’s brand awareness, driving consideration or getting conversions, your campaign objective will dictate the type of Pinterest ad campaign you choose.

A few of the objectives have additional requirements:

• If traffic is your objective, you’re required to have the Pinterest Tag added on your website
• Conversions need you to designate an activity that takes place on your website
• Catalog sales require either Product Rich Pins or an uploaded catalog

3. Set a budget & schedule

Next, set your budget and when you want the ad to run. Pinterest provides budget recommendations per objective. Except for the video view objective that uses ad groups, budgets are set at the campaign level. You can choose either a daily or lifetime budget and how you want to bid.

Bidding is either automatic or custom. For automatic bidding, Pinterest will manage your bid for you. This is a good option if you’re just starting out on ads and want to see how they perform before making any changes.

4. Create Pinterest ad groups with targeting

There are quite a few options in Pinterest ads which is why we created a guide dedicated solely to Pinterest ad targeting. A campaign can have multiple ad groups. You can choose from a variety of targeting options including interests, website visitors and keywords.

5. Choose the Pins

Now, it’s time to choose the creative for your ads. For best results, remember to follow recommendations for sizes on videos and photos. Pinterest automatically provides you with a view of Pins and Boards to choose for an ad. If you’re new to Pinterest, review some content tips to inspire your ad creative.

How to measure your Pinterest Ad results

To see how your campaign is performing, you’ll be able to access the results right in Pinterest Ads Manager. But if you want a bigger picture that includes ads but also info about your website and profile performance, Pinterest Analytics is the way to go.

Beyond just reading data about your campaigns, you’ll also access information on which Pins are being made from your website. Audience and conversion insights offer you the ability to compare audiences and see what actions people are taking on your site. If you run video ads, there’s a separate section for you that gives you metrics like average play time and number of 10-second plays.

Our guide to understanding Pinterest Analytics can help define the various terms on the platform, especially if you’re starting out.

3 tips for creating successful Pinterest Ads

We put together 3 top tips to get your started on a successful Pinterest advertising journey.

1. Optimize your images and copy

As an image-first platform, it’s incredibly important to optimize your creative assets. Your photos should be attention-grabbing and within the recommended specs. Oftentimes, adding a text overlay helps people quickly understand what they’ll get if they click on the Pin.

Pinterest also runs on keywords so pay attention to what you’re putting into your titles and descriptions. Having relevant and popular keywords means that your Pins will show up in search results. In the above example, you know exactly what the Pin is about and the brand before even expanding the Pin itself.

2. Spend on what works

Using the Pinterest Ads Manager dashboard, you’ll be able to see which campaigns and ad groups are performing the best, as well as the keywords you’ve chosen. After you’ve run a few ads, you should be able to understand what’s working and what’s not. For example, if the keyword phrase “winter outfits” is performing well, try to create more ads that target those keywords.

3. Stay on top of trends

To help businesses know what’s trending, Pinterest has a Trends page available for the US, UK and Canada. It breaks down what’s currently trending for the week as well as category. Knowing these various trends help you understand what content to create and which keywords to target.

When you’re looking to plan ahead, use Pinterest Predicts to see what the platform’s gathered data predicts will be the newest trends. This is a great way to be ahead of the curve and not just with what’s popular now.

Create your Pinterest Ad

Now that you know more about the various Pin types and how to set up a Pinterest ad, the next step is to create one. If you’re not quite ready yet, explore our step-by-step guide on successfully selling on Pinterest.

The post The complete Pinterest advertising guide to more valuable ads appeared first on Sprout Social.

While social media stories aren’t anything new, as more platforms add this capability to their apps, it’s important for businesses to understand how to properly use these to their advantage. Not only does it give you an entirely new avenue for reaching your followers, but your content doesn’t have to be nearly as polished as it does on your feed.

Let’s dive into a little bit more about what these stories are, what platforms you’ll find them on (for now) and some of the best ways you can use this feature.

What are social media stories?

Social media stories started on Snapchat, but have since branched out to nearly every other social media and communication platform. These are quick, typically 10-15 second photo or video clips that give people a slightly different glimpse into a person or business and disappear within 24 hours.

While feeds are carefully curated, social media stories tend to be more spontaneous. For brands, this can mean showcasing smartphone-captured behind-the-scenes footage, company announcements and more.

The biggest defining factor in stories is that they are temporary. On most platforms, they last only 24 hours, although Instagram does give users the option to save certain stories to their highlights reel for users to view again and again. This helps drive the more casual feel of stories, and can also create an element of FOMO.

Now that you know a bit more about what social media stories are, let’s cover the platforms that have now introduced various versions of this feature.

What platforms offer social media stories?

For years, Snapchat was the only platform with this disappearing content feature. Then, in 2016, Instagram incorporated it into their platform. Facebook and Facebook Messenger followed not long after that. And now, we see it in nearly 10 different platforms.

We’ll show you where you can access stories on each of these platforms below.

1. Facebook Stories

As you’ll see, most platforms showcase their stories right at the top of the app so it’s one of the first things you see when you open it on your smartphone. This makes it a great way to ‘skip the line’ of the curated algorithm on many networks.

Even for desktop users, Facebook displays Stories at the top of their feed, but this feature is definitely meant more for mobile use.

You can add a story to Facebook by clicking the plus sign icon on the photo that says Add to Story, or you can create your story in Instagram and connect it to your Facebook Page.

Stories from both businesses and friends appear alongside each other, which means you’re much more likely to reach an audience on Facebook if you regularly use stories rather than only posting content to the feed.

2. Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories appear in small circles at the top of your feed. They’ll disappear once you begin scrolling, but you can easily tap the top of your screen to scroll right back up to view stories.

The first bubbles that appear will always be live videos – if anyone you follow is live – then the rest is a mixture of brand and profile stories, just like Facebook. Additionally, as users scroll through their feed or explore pages, profiles with available stories will have a colorful ring around their profile photo as a call-to-action.

3. Twitter Fleets (Stories)

Twitter tested the release of a stories feature, called Twitter Fleets in late 2020. However, in July and August of 2021, Fleets was removed after it did not significantly increase new conversations in the way that the social network had hoped.

Similar to other platforms, Fleets were featured at the top of the regular feed. As they are phased out, this space will be used by Twitter’s audio chat rooms, Spaces.

4. LinkedIn Stories

Even the business networking platform LinkedIn also has their own version of stories available at the top of their apps. While you’re not able to share the content you post on LinkedIn to their stories, this is a unique way to let your business connections get a behind-the-scenes look into your processes and business.

Although Stories content tends to be more candid, make sure that the content you share on LinkedIn stories remains professional. You’re likely not going to be sharing photos while out at happy hour on your LinkedIn the way you might on Facebook or Instagram.

5. Pinterest Stories

Pinterest’s story feature offers another way to share your Pinterest content on this platform, and the different stories stack up at the top of a user’s app. As you can see above, Glitter Guide had two separate stories they shared.

Pinterest stories also differ from other networks because they don’t disappear after 24 hours, and they stay on your profile in story form after you share them.

6. Snapchat Stories

Of course we all know Snapchat the originator of disappearing social media stories. While this format is now widespread, Snapchat did offer the first platform for many brands to experiment with how disappearing content and a more casual approach to content production might work for them on social media. Many publications and influencers have attempted to make something of their Discover pages, but Snapchat marketing can still be a strategy that works depending on your brand.

7. YouTube Stories

YouTube is also rolling out their own stories feature, although it’s currently only available for channels with over 10,000 subscribers. With YouTube Shorts appearing as a rival to TikTok’s short video content it makes sense that the most popular video sharing platform is trying to capitalize on all of the ways creators can share video content and attract audiences.

What to post on social media stories

Now that you know all of your options with publishing social media stories content, it’s time to take a quick look into a few of the types of content that perform well.  These seven ideas are great ways to get started on creating social media stories for one or multiple networks, and test out the content that works for your brand.

1. Share behind-the-scenes

Social media stories are the perfect place for sharing the less curated and styled parts of your business’s products and services.

Here’s an example from a local bar sharing a quick video from a staff training day. While their feed showcases professional photos of their food and drinks, this behind-the-scenes clip shows a different side of the restaurant.

Think about what your business can do to share behind-the-scenes photos or videos. This might be showcasing employees or sharing the packaging process of your products.

2. Poll your audience

Many stories platforms have stickers that allow your viewers to interact with your stories. This means it’s a great idea to ask questions or poll your audience to get their direct feedback.

Here’s an example from Grove Collaborative, a company selling sustainable household products, uses one of their highlighted stories to educate their audience and get direct interaction from their audience via the poll sticker for Instagram Stories. Not only can this be a fun way for your viewers to engage with your brand, but you can also use it to get consumer insight on potential product ideas.

3. Link external content

Another great idea is to use your social media stories to send followers to your additional products, services, landing pages, blog posts, lead magnets and more.

While platforms like Instagram require users to meet the 10,000 follower threshold before getting access to add the swipe up link out to external content, Pinterest allows all users to link out to external content. Pinterest is more of a search engine, though, so this makes sense.

As you work towards 10,000 followers on Instagram, start taking advantage of Pinterest and other stories platforms to send traffic to your website, like we see below with Glitter Guide.

4. Share recent social posts

Want to get more traction to your regular social media posts? Share those to your stories so they’re essentially located in two places at once, maximizing reach.

We see Social Media Examiner doing this on Twitter Fleets below, and you can also do this on Facebook and Instagram Stories.

You can also share posts from other users on your stories, which can be a great way to share mentions, user-generated content or partnerships.

5. Showcase products and services

Social media stories are a great place for showcasing products and services in action, or even promoting a flash sale or a daily/weekly special.

Here’s a great example from a taco restaurant on Facebook Stories, sharing a photo and description of a limited time taco.

Create graphics like you see here, or simply share photos or video of the product/service that you’re promoting.

6. Announce company updates

Company launches, announcements or major releases are also perfect content to share on your stories. This type of content gets people excited and wanting to interact with and work with your brand.

Here’s an example from Freddy’s, announcing the opening of a new location. The announcement will show up prominently thanks to the visibility of Stories at the top of feeds, letting fans of the restaurant know and share news about the new location.

7. Repurpose content

Whether you repurpose blog posts into graphics or edit YouTube videos into vertical Stories videos, repurposing content to extend its shelf life and maximize its reach is a great use for your social media stories.

Here, we see graphic design software Visme repurposing a horizontal video and publishing it on Pinterest Stories to reach an entirely new audience.

Make the most of your social media stories

Social media stories should be a major part of your social media content strategy, especially as nearly every major network starts adding them to their sites. The disappearing and casual nature of stories makes them a great venue for experimenting with some formats that are more spontaneous or outside your usual feed content. Start testing the types of content we covered to see how your audience responds and refine your stories strategy across social networks.

The post Social media stories: Your guide to all social media story platforms appeared first on Sprout Social.

When you create a business account, you gain access to a lot of Pinterest benefits that you wouldn’t have otherwise, creating so many new opportunities for your online presence.

Read through this guide to help you understand just how powerful a Pinterest business account can be for your brand.

Benefits of using Pinterest for Business

1. Spot emerging trends

Pinterest is the number one platform where consumers share products, designs and trends that they’re loving. To ensure that your brand is on the forefront of upcoming trends in your industry, you want to maintain an active presence on Pinterest.

Not only should you follow influencers in your industry on the platform to find emerging trends, but Pinterest regularly aggregates categories of popular content for users based on their searches.

Check out these search options that appear when a user clicks on the search bar. For me, it includes curated content from interior design styling ideas to website and business resources.

These aggregate search categories will appear based on your searches, and if you’re searching for things related to your business, you’re likely to see options that will be hyper-targeted to your brand and audience.

Search through these ideas to see which products or services you should be promoting or adding for your customers and clients.

2. Increase brand authority

When you create a Pinterest business account, you get access to a few features on your profile that regular accounts don’t have.

Take a look at my Pinterest business profile below.

There are several elements to this profile that regular Pinterest users can’t access:

• A header full of your own branded pins
• Insight into the number of viewers your pins get
• A verified website

Each of these lend to your brand authority, giving you a more legitimate online presence.

3. Drive website traffic

As I mentioned in the last point, you’re able to include your verified website address on your Pinterest business profile.

This is one great way to immediately start driving website traffic from your Pinterest profile.

To add, a Pinterest business account gives you access to rich Pins, a type of Pin that offers more information about your landing page than a regular Pin. For product Pins, that include pricing information and other product specs.

Here’s an example of a product Pin below.

Pins like this showcase more information about your product, service or blog post before a user saves or clicks on it. Enticing users can lead to more clicks and more traffic.

4. Access your analytics

Another great perk of using a Pinterest business account is the ability to see analytics for your Pins, especially the ones that you’ve saved from your website.

You’re able to view impressions, engagements, clicks, views and so much more. You can also select specific date ranges and view all of your pins or only the Pins saved from your website.

If you’re looking for other Pinterest performance information, you can also check your report in Sprout Social’s dashboard.

Viewing your analytics is a great way to see which Pins are getting the most clicks and generating the most traffic to your website so that you can promote them for even more success and create similar products, blog posts or Pins to replicate that success.

5. Run ads and promoted Pins

Our last top benefit of Pinterest business accounts is the ability to run ads and promoted Pins. Gaining access to Pinterest advertising and targeting features is a major benefit, and can help you to see even more success from your Pinterest profile.

Simply head over to the Ads tab in your business account’s navigation bar to get started.

Choose to build ad campaigns around brand awareness, traffic or conversions, and you can choose hyper-specific interest targeting for your ads.

Because Pinterest is used as a visual search engine, it has really powerful ad targeting options since it knows exactly what people are searching for and interested in. Users are often on the platform researching purchases, and highlighting your products on the network front and center can generate more sales and conversions.

Pinterest advertising is also extremely affordable, and if you have a visual product or service, you should definitely set aside some of your advertising budget for this platform.

Get started using Pinterest for business today

Ready to take advantage of all of these benefits of Pinterest? Create your own Pinterest business account and check out our 5-step Pinterest marketing guide to get started.

The post Top 5 benefits of a Pinterest business account appeared first on Sprout Social.

And with Pinterest boasting 320 million monthly active users, that is a lot of people going to this one platform just to shop.

This is all the more reason why your brand should make the most of this platform and, most importantly, learn how to sell on Pinterest.

Why you should sell on Pinterest

We’ve already covered that 89% of US pinners on the platform are using it specifically to plan out purchases and research products, but that’s not all you need to know.

Nearly half of all users are logging onto the site just to shop. Forty-seven percent to be exact. That’s about 150 million potential new customers buying your products.

So find your target audience, get your products in front of them and wait for those dollar signs to start rolling in, right?

Of course, it’s not quite that easy. In fact, the next section is the steps you need to take before you start selling on Pinterest.

Getting your brand ready to sell on Pinterest

We know you’re excited about the prospect of leveraging all of those shoppers on Pinterest. But before you take any action, read these four quick steps to help you get your brand ready for selling.

1. Determine your target audience

It’s always important to have a good understanding of a social media platform’s demographics before starting a new campaign.

Putting together a customer persona will help you make sure you know exactly who you need to be targeting on the platform. This will consist of your target audience’s optimal income, job criteria, lifestyle and more.

2. Set up a business account

Having a Pinterest business account is very different from having a personal account. You get access to more features, such as analytics, ads and other necessary elements for selling on Pinterest.

If you created your account as a personal profile, don’t worry. You can easily switch to a business account by logging into your existing profile and converting it.

Otherwise create a new Pinterest business account right off the bat. Just head over to Pinterest and sign up!

3. Brand your account

Each one of your business’s social media profiles should be immediately discernible to your customers and followers, and your Pinterest profile is no different.

To brand your profile, make sure your profile photo is a high-res logo or headshot of yourself (if you are the face of your business) and that it matches your other profiles, your bio is optimized, your cover boards match your brand, contact information is current and more.

You can learn all about how to properly brand your Pinterest profile by checking out our 5-step Pinterest marketing strategy.

4. Link and verify your website

The final step in prepping your Pinterest business profile is to link and verify your business website.

Adding your website through profile settings is simple enough, but then you need to claim your website. To do this, add a meta tag or upload an HTML file to your website. You can learn more about how to do this directly from Pinterest.

You can only verify and claim one website for each Pinterest business account, so make sure it’s your main site that you make sales from or else you won’t be able to create a shop and link products.

How to sell on Pinterest

Now that we’ve gotten the basics out of the way, let’s get into the important stuff – how to sell on Pinterest and start making money.

We have eight top tips for selling on Pinterest and really turning this visual platform into a new revenue stream.

Let’s dive in.

1. Create stunning visuals

First things first. Pinterest is a visual platform. Even before we dive into several types of Pins that can help increase sales, you need to make sure that your Pins are actually visually appealing and make someone want to click.

This means you need:

• High-quality photography
• Beautifully designed graphics
• Optimally sized visuals
• Bold colors and fonts
• Graphics that match your branding

At least, that’s the starting point. We’ll show you a few examples of high-quality pins to show you what we mean.

One great way to stand out is by taking professional photography of your product in use, like all of these furniture companies did with coffee tables.

You can also create a beautiful, branded graphic Pin like the one below that draws users in and entices them to save, click on and purchase what you’re promoting.

Or you can do a mix of both, where you create a graphic or text overlay alongside a professional photo, providing information on a product and a product photo.

2. Focus on Pinterest SEO

Pinterest is a visual search engine, which means it has its own search engine optimization rules and algorithms.

Focus on industry keywords and use them strategically in your Pin titles and descriptions, as well as your in board titles and descriptions.

Make sure that you’re incorporating your keywords properly and naturally to help ensure your Pinterest SEO will work. This will expand the reach of your Pinterest content, increasing the likelihood that someone will buy.

3. Use Rich Pins

Rich Pins extract extra data and information from your website to display alongside the normal pin info (like photo, title, description, etc.).

It pulls in the price and product descriptions so that users are able to view this information within Pinterest itself. On mobile, users will even be able to click a blue Shop button to head right to your product and check out.

If the shop offers this info, these Pins will even let you know whether or not the product is in stock.

Here is an example of a product Rich Pin from Etsy.

These types of Rich Pins work once you claim your website on Pinterest (see the “Getting your brand ready to sell on Pinterest” section). So take advantage of the platforms offering to draw in more sales.

4. Use promoted Pins

Want to push your Pins to the top instead rather than relying solely on your Pinterest SEO. Invest in promoted Pins!

These can be anything – a lead magnet, a blog post or a product.

Promoted product Pins can be helpful for generating more sales as they simply take the user directly to your website.

As you see below with Crate and Barrel’s promoted Pin, users will easily be able to see which company is promoting pins so they know which site they’ll be taken to.

When creating promoted Pins, you’ll be able to target by interest, age and gender. You can create entire campaigns or quick ads for a one-off promotion.

5. Organize Pins into Catalogs

Catalogs are an excellent Pinterest business account feature to use if you have products to promote — which is likely true if you’re a brand or business!

As long as you have a data source of all your products and their attributes, you should be able to upload the file into Pinterest. Once the data source is approved, any product you add to your website will also automatically create product Pins which you can then use to create shopping ads.

One thing to note: If it turns out you do not have the right data source to create Catalogs, then you’ll have to use Rich Pins instead (tip #4 above!).

6. Tag products in Shop the Look Pins

Shop the Look Pins are a great way to link to several products at once in a single Pin. Whether it’s an outfit or home decor post, each product available for purchase in the photo is shown via a white dot that users can click on to see more.

You can share photos of your models wearing an outfit of your latest collection or a room filled with your furniture or similar products to promote more products on the platform.

The process for Shop the Look Pins is manual, and once your Pin is linked to your claimed website, you can tag as many products as you’d like.

7. Share user-generated content (UGC)

Found a celeb or well-known influencer using your product? Use that to your advantage!

Better yet, set up influencer marketing campaigns to consistently generate content you can share on Pinterest and entice your audience to buy.

You can even use UGC as Shop the Look Pins or promote these photos to grab user attention even more. Social proof is everything, and if a user sees someone they follow wearing your products, they’re much more likely to buy.

8. Incorporate content marketing

Blog posts that are geared towards conversions are perfect to share on Pinterest. Think gift guides, product roundups or tutorials.

These are great pieces of content to save and promote on the site that will generate clicks, and if you put your content together properly, conversions.

Start selling on Pinterest

Learn even more about how to sell on Pinterest by checking out more Sprout Social Insights, like this post all about Pinterest ad targeting. Then get started creating content, saving to boards, promoting and targeting, then watch the sales roll in.

The post How to sell on Pinterest: A step-by-step guide for brands appeared first on Sprout Social.