Mobile Pinterest Marketing

We live in an increasingly mobile world. Is your Pinterest marketing strategy ready for it?

If you’re like the vast majority of human beings in 2014, you probably do a lot of browsing on your phone or tablet. In fact, by February 2014 mobile devices accounted for 55% internet usage in the US with mobile apps making up 47% of that usage. Those numbers only increase when you look at how user are visiting Pinterest. As of early 2014, mobile browsing accounted for 75% of Pinterest’s traffic. This shift in Internet usage requires a necessary shift for Pinterest marketing, too. So, what can you do to make your Pinterest presence mobile friendly? Well, below we’ve outlined a few quick tips to help your Pinterest mobile marketing strategy.

Take Up More Real Estate

When pinning from a mobile or tablet app, a user can only see between 2-4 columns of pins in a frame:

Example: Mobile Pinterest app for iPhone.

Example: Mobile Pinterest app for iPad

While it’s important to create vertical pins for the desktop site, it’s arguably more important to create vertical pins for mobile, since the pin will continue as the user scrolls. However, there are certain pixel ratios, as Vincent Ng discovered, for keeping longer pins away from the dreaded “Expand pin” territory:

via MCNG Marketing

While Android and Apple devices do have different pixel ratios, as long as you stay within the 3.67:1 ratio – what Vincent calls the “Golden Ratio” – you’ll be safe on all devices.

Bigger Text 

A smaller screen means a smaller image, which means text on images will be smaller and harder to read. For example, check out how these two pins compare on my iPhone:

The one the right stands out more, right? The only difference between the two images is the size of the text. While giant text might not make sense on all images (you probably don’t need the word “DRESS” plastered across a picture of a dress), it could be the difference between a mobile repin or your pin just being ignored.

Optimize Website

The ultimate goal of most brands on Pinterest is to get click throughs on their pins. But once that user clicks on that pin you want their experience to go as smoothly as possible. If your site doesn’t have a mobile responsive design there’s a good chance they’ll leave the page. Thankfully many website hosts are already mobile responsive – like SquareSpace and Weebly, for example – and there are many great WordPress plugins to help, too.

iOS + Pinterest

With Apple’s iOS 8 release, Pinterest unveiled their brand-new share option within the Safari and Chrome mobile apps. It’s now simple to pin an image from the web – even on the go:

While this feature ties into optimizing your website for mobile, it’s also useful for curating your brand’s Pinterest account. If you find a particularly amazing pin while you’re away from the computer, you can go ahead and pin it with ease! No worry about having to bookmark it or email it to yourself to find later. After all, there’s no time like the present.

How do you optimize your Pinterest strategy for mobile? Let us know in the comments!