How to Use Pinterest Video Pins for Business
Video content on Pinterest is a good way to get more engagement from your followers, customers, and potential customers. Pinterest engineering has been consistently adding new features for businesses. In this round of updates they’ve made it easier to save, distribute, and track video content. The latest additions are the video tab, lifetime video Pin metrics, and an improved uploader interface. All of these are only available to Pinterest business accounts, which you can get for free if you don’t already have one. You can also combine other helpful features like Rich Pins, Promoted Pins, tagging, and Shop the Look Pins. Promoted pins, which are Pinterest’s version of paid promotions or paid advertising, can be videos too. Check out the new max width Pins.
Why Video Pins?
It’s a well established fact that videos increase engagement. Click through rates in emails and conversions on web pages both increase significantly when a video is included. The same holds true for Pinterest video Pins. They are a practical way to engage your audience, feature a product, or demonstrate how to use your product. Users engage with do-it-yourself (DIY) videos. Lifestyle videos have proven to increase user engagement ten times. Videos don’t have to be long to be effective. The average video watch time on Pinterest is about thirteen minutes but you can grab your audience’s attention with a short five to fifteen second video.
Personal Accounts Cannot Upload Videos
Pinterest business accounts are something I’ve been concentrating on in most of my recent videos. Business accounts are necessary to access some account settings like analytics for Promoted Pins as well as video Pins.
If you have a personal Pinterest account, meaning there is no website associated with it, you cannot upload a video Pin. You can only add a video if you tried something seen in an existing Pin. If someone posts, say for example a recipe, and you made that recipe you can add a video and claim that you “tried it.” Basically it’s a comment on the Pin – the closest concept Pinterest has to a review. So personal Pinterest users can not add or upload videos of their own, it’s a powerful ability reserved for business users.
Be Sure You are Set Up for Video Pins
My recent tutorials have focused on adjusting Pinterest account settings in order to optimize Pinterest business profiles. I recently had a client that I was consulting for ask me how to begin. He wanted to set up his account by himself. I instructed him to create a login, and claim his website. When he gave me the login credentials, he assured me that he was indeed all set up with a business account. When I logged in I saw that he had not actually claimed as website so he would not be able to use video Pins, Promoted Pins, or see analytics.
You can be certain that you have a Pinterest business if there is a website connected to it. Either look at your profile page and look for the clickable website URL in your bio or login and check your account settings. Then check to make sure you have access to Pinterest analytics in as well as advertisements. With a Pinterest business account, you will also see that you have the video tab in your profile.
Pinterest Video Pins
First founded 2010, Pinterest was a bit slow to adopt a video strategy. To save a video to the social media channel, it had to be hosted elsewhere as either a TED talk or on Vimeo. Facebook has been a leader in videos with live videos, longer uploaded videos, and sharing between pages. This left Pinterest lagging.
Eventually Pinterest allowed shared Pins from YouTube. Uploading videos is much easier with the most recent update. It’s just like saving any other Pinterest Pin. It does however take some time for Pinterest to process the video. It appears that there is a manual review process behind the scenes that must finish before the video appears as a saved Pin. For me, video Pins have been taking 30 minutes to appear on my video tab. So if you need video content available by a certain time, you may want to upload your video to a secret board then resave it to a public board at a time that fits your schedule.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a highly visual social network with over 250 million active monthly users. Fifty percent of Millennials use Pinterest and 95 percent of them also use YouTube. Pinterest users are shoppers and 97 percent are looking for products in unbranded searches. Pinterest recently went IPO and is now publicly traded on the stock market. Now as the fourth largest social media network, Pinterest is no longer considered a flash in the pan. Expanding their video offerings for businesses is just one of their many recent upgrades.
Enable Video Pins
Although we know that most users, about 80 percent, are accessing Pinterest using the Android or iOS mobile app, many business features must be managed from the Pinterest website. For example, Pinterest users can connect, called claiming, their Instagram, Etsy, and YouTube accounts. Only recently an update allowed Promoted Pins to be managed from the mobile app.
Adding or editing your website must be done from the settings section on your account. You can accomplish by using either the mobile app or web Pinterest. To view or edit your account settings and to be sure you are set up for Pinterest videos, you will need to access your account menu.
Enable Video Pins – Pinterest Website
- Click the three dots in the upper right corner of web Pinterest screen
- Click settings from the menu
- Add your website to convert to a business account. If it is already connected, you are all set to save video Pins
Enable Video Pins – Pinterest Mobile App
- Open the mobile app and login
- Tap your profile icon in the lower right corner of your screen
- Tap the gear icon in the upper right corner
- Add your website to convert to a business account. If it is already connected, you are all set to save video Pins
Video Tab
Pinterest video Pins are segregated to make them easier to find. Pinterest now has a new video tab on the profile page so when other Pinners come to your account, they can opt to go right to the video tab and see your latest videos. The videos are still saved to a board, but they are also on their own tab in your profile.
Get More From Your Video Strategy
I recommend if you are going to invest the time and resources into creating videos, then get more out of your marketing efforts by posting them on YouTube and other social media channels too. Take your marketing strategy a step further and embed your videos on webpages and in email campaigns. Web Pages with videos enjoy higher conversion rates. Pinterest Pins with matching landing pages earn 10% higher conversion rates. All of my tutorial videos reside on my YouTube channel which is probably where you’re watching this. I also embed them in my blog posts and send them out in my weekly email newsletters.
Video Thumbnail Sizes
Repurposing YouTube or Instagram videos to Pinterest a good way to get more ROI from your strategy. I recommend that you create a custom thumbnail for YouTube videos and you should create another size for Pinterest videos. That’s because the ideal aspect ratio is different for each social media channel. Taller Pinterest Pins earn more engagement than square Pins. Although you can use any image that meets the minimum requirement for a video thumbnail, it’s not the best option. When you are uploading your video to Pintetest, take the extra step to add a custom thumbnail so your new video tab looks good.
New Pinterest Video Pin Uploader
Depending on where a video is going to be used – on Pinterest or YouTube, in an email, embedded in a blog post, or on Facebook or other social media you will need to create a thumbnail specifically for Pinterest.
Taller pins earn more engagement – more comments, views, and close-ups than wide or square Pins do. If you don’t have a video thumbnail that has a taller aspect ratio, then there is a tool in the new Pinterest video uploader to help rectify that. It’s an extra step, but when you go to upload a video Pin there is an option to resize video thumbnails (It work for regular Pins too.) The image editor will resize your video thumbnail for you to make it a taller rather than square or wider than it is tall. Ideally, use a 2-to-3 aspect ratio, for example 200 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall.
How to Optimize Pinterest Videos
When posting videos include a title and try to use up as much of the 500 character description as possible. You also have the option to choose a thumbnail. Although you can choose a thumbnail from the video, you may want to create a custom thumbnail so you have the optimum aspect ratio.