The lines between social and mobile marketing continue to blur. Although you may have been designing your brand’s pins for a desktop audience, Pinterest now estimates that about 75% of its audience accesses the site via mobile. What steps should a brand take to ensure their pins are just as attractive and accessible on mobile as they are on desktop? We spoke with Danny Maloney, CEO and co-founder of Tailwind, to find out.
lonelybrand: Should brands create pins that are optimized specifically for mobile Pinterest users?
Danny Maloney: Great pins, like great websites, are simultaneously optimized for desktop and mobile. Consider both use cases when crafting pins. Mobile may drive more traffic, but for many businesses, desktop or tablet use will still drive more revenue.
What design tips should brands keep in mind when creating pins?
Mobile screen real estate is more limited, but if you think about what images will jump off the page as you scroll through a Pinterest board or home feed on a PC, the same holds true for mobile:
- Even in small format, it should be obvious what the image is. Avoid very zoomed out images with important small details that are likely to be skipped over.
- Bold or vibrant colors and contrast help. They make your pin more visible in a stream of many images.
- The beginning of your description or Board Name should make the context clear. Mobile pins often display shorter descriptions and fewer characters of a Board Name than pins viewed on a PC, so get the point across up front. Consider this example of a pin with a well written description to catch attention in both cases, but a Board name that is unintelligible on mobile:
What should brands keep in mind when linking pins to urls?
To serve the mobile user, you should either have a mobile-accessible website or provide the option for users to view your content automatically in your (optimized) mobile app when they visit your site from a mobile phone. And, of course, don’t forget to have mobile CTAs on your site that drive value for your business! Otherwise, you’re wasting all of that mobile traffic!
Are there any other tips you can offer for brands to make sure that their pins work across all of Pinterest’s platforms?
At the end of the day, quality and relevance are the most important things. Focus on what your audience is passionate about and needs to know. Then craft great pins that will represent your brand well for months to come. Without quality and relevance, nothing else matters.
