What to Pin on Pinterest as a Wedding Photographer
Whether you’re a Pinterest guru, or you’re just starting out on the platform, it is important to have a good understanding of exactly what to Pin on Pinterest. If you want to make your Pinterest profile pop, you’ve got to be strategic!
In this post, we will be teaching you more than just how to curate a visually stunning feed. You’ll learn where and how to pull content that is guaranteed to receive strong engagement and drive traffic to your wedding photography website. Whether you are an industry veteran with a mountain of photo archives to Pin from, or relatively new to the game and haven’t yet built up a large portfolio of work, this article will help teach you what to Pin on Pinterest, to build a thriving Pinterest account.
First Things First: Pinning Your Own Content
As a wedding photographer, you shouldn’t merely be using your Pinterest account as a source of inspiration or a visual mood board. Rather, your Pinterest account can be one of your most lucrative marketing platforms, if you use it correctly!
Pinterest functions like a visual search engine, making it a key vehicle for potential clients and customers to find your work and book your services, but they’ll have a hard time finding you if the majority of what you Pin is other people’s images. Pinterest works best when the majority of the content you’re pinning leads back to you, which means you need to be pinning your own content.
On top of that, pinning from your website, rather than uploading photos directly to the Pinterest platform will provide you with the best results since Pinterest favors posts that contain an exact keyword match both in the Pin description and in the URL that you link to.
When you understand Pinterest from this perspective, it will transform the platform! Now you can understand why it is so important to Pin your own content rather than just circulating other people’s!
As you plan what to Pin on Pinterest, we want to encourage you to consider where your Pins are guiding your viewers. Where is your audience directed when they click through on one of your Pins?
The aim of the game is this: the fewer steps between your Pins and your website booking page, the better. You want to make it as easy as possible for someone to book your services, by reducing the middle steps.
Keep in mind, that doesn’t mean simply linking all your images to your contact page or shop. When a Pin’s description doesn’t line up with the page it’s linking to, Pinterest’s algorithm takes note and your Pin can end up being suppressed on their platform.
There are two main questions to consider before you start pinning any content:
Where is your visual content currently located on the web?
Is this location likely to convert into a sale?
Where to Pin From:
Your Blog Posts
What it is: Your blog posts are regularly updated written content, posted to your website. These will likely contain 4-5 pinnable images and are posted at a cadence of at least 2-4 blogs per month. If you’re not already blogging, then this is the PERFECT opportunity to kick off your blog page. Check out our post, How to Write a Wedding Blog: 5 Tips Every Wedding Photographer Needs to Know to get you started.
The Benefits: Blog posts truly are the BEST place to Pin from! Pinning from your blog posts is a great way to lead your audience directly to your website. Your blog post will already contain keywords that you can use in your Pin description in order to succeed with the Pinterest algorithm.
Your Online Portfolio
What it is: An online site (either separate to or included within) your website that displays your finest work as a wedding photographer. This is likely updated quarterly or bi-annually, to reflect your top photos from fresh shoots.
The Benefits: This is a perfect example of exactly what to Pin on Pinterest, since it will contain a full evolution of your creative style and demonstrate your full body of work.
The Drawbacks: However, we don’t just want you to Pin content for content’s sake - we want to help you get the most out of your Pinterest presence by using SEO best practices whenever possible. From an SEO perspective, one crucial component is ensuring that your Pin description uses the same keywords as the URL page you are driving too. This keyword match will boost your performance! The likelihood is that your Portfolio page is intentionally text-free so that it looks visually striking and clean. There are several ways that you could add text to your portfolio, in order to strategically place keywords…
One way would be to add a small paragraph of text at the bottom of your portfolio page.
An alternative, and more discrete route, would be to ensure that you include keywords in the backend of the website, through your alt-text, your meta description, and SEO title.
In short: Since your booking page is likely to live on your business website, pinning any content from your site will take viewers one step closer to booking your services. With this in mind, we’d advocate that you don’t Pin directly from your social media channels. Pinning from Instagram builds a Pin URL link that leads your audience back to your Instagram profile. In essence, you take your audience from one online portfolio to another online portfolio, which means they aren’t any closer to the all-important booking page.
What To Pin on Pinterest From Your Blog Pages
There are two main blog styles that you can create and Pin from:
Photo Blogs
These are image-heavy posts, with an introductory micro-blog of at least 300 words.
This gives you an opportunity to include keywords in your text while including as many images as you want.
These kinds of blogs are a great way to generate a large amount of Pinterest content very quickly since each image can be added to multiple Pinterest boards to maximize your content even further.
A Photo Blog containing 100 photos, could very well translate into 300-500 Pins!
Informational Blogs
These kinds of blogs have a ‘How-To’ or educational angle.
They teach your audience a skill or tip and position you as an expert in your field.
As a wedding photographer, your informational blogs could be about the wedding industry at large, not just the photography elements.
For example, as a wedding photographer, you’ve likely interacted with many wedding planners. So, why not take what you’ve learned and write a blog about your top tips for choosing a wedding planner?
Informational blogs build trust with your audience and establish you as a resource to brides during their wedding planning process.
If you are pinning from a blog, then our advice is that you create several Pinterest graphics displaying your blog title with text overlaying one of your beautiful images.
Not only do graphics always perform well, but they are a great example of ‘Fresh Pins’ - since you can recycle your top-performing content with enough tweaks and changes to the graphic that Pinterest doesn’t mistake it for a repeat Pin.
What to Pin on Pinterest If You’ve Exhausted Your Content Archive
Things are changing in the Pinterest game.
It used to be an unspoken rule that Pinterest etiquette meant posting 80% of your own content and 20% from other people.
However, in a recent conversation on Jenna Kutcher’s podcast Alisa Meredith, Pinterest Product Specialist at Tailwind inspired us by saying: “It’s way past time to shift that thinking into realizing that Pinterest is all about YOU!”
While the majority of your content on Pinterest should be your own, there are still some benefits in pinning work from other people.
Using the Tailwind Tribe Feature - If you are struggling to figure out what to Pin on Pinterest, the Tailwind Tribe feature allows you to join ‘Tribe’ communities with other content creators in your niche. In becoming a member of a ‘Tribe’ you promise to share content from within that community, in exchange for members sharing your Pins in return. Not only will you see an increase in your Pin re-shares, but you’ll have easy access to the best content in your niche.
If you’ve never heard of Tailwind, then we can’t recommend it enough! It is the perfect third-party app to help with your Pinterest planning and scheduling. You can read more about it on your blog, What is Tailwind.
Repin Other People’s Images to Create Context - I know we just said that it’s all about pinning your content, but sometimes this is a good alternative if you’re short on images or you want to use other people’s work to set the tone for your style. When you Pin other people’s content, you give Pinterest a broader context to understand what your Pins and Boards are about. This ultimately benefits you, since it allows Pinterest to circulate your content better and position you within the Wedding niche so that you can best stand out to future clients.
Start Pinning Today
The reality is that as long as you have content, you have something to Pin. We’d encourage you to spend some time today making an audit of your website. Review how many blogs you have to work from, and your future blog posting cadence. From this, you can refine a Pinterest posting schedule that uses both archival and fresh blog content. Create a plan, so that you don’t drain all of your content. You want to make it last.
Bonus Tip: We build out our Pinterest schedule using a third-party app called Tailwind. Tailwind allows you to Pin the same Pin to multiple boards and gives in-depth insights that can help you grow your Pinterest Strategy.
We’re sure that you’ll be surprised by how much you already have to Pin.
*This post includes affiliate links to external platforms that we love and truly believe in. If you choose to make a purchasing decision using the links provided on this post, we make a small commission at no cost to you.
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