What’s the deal with Idea pins & why you should use them

What the flip are idea pins!? 

So, you’ve probably been hearing the words ‘idea pins’ a lot on the Pinterest platform lately, but like me, you’ve probably been wondering “what the heck is it?”. Well, luckily for you my friend, I went away to find out the answer to that exact question & boy have I got the juice for you. 

To start, Idea pins are one of the newest & latest features that have been introduced to Pinterest. It's one of the many features that have great potential to become a real asset towards growing & helping your web traffic improve even more on the platform. 

Think of it as the equivalent of Instagram stories. They give you more ways to share ideas with your viewers with up to 20 pages of images, text & video. They’re great for you if you wish to gain more followers and earn more of a popularity status on Pinterest.

But you're probably thinking “yeah that sounds good but what other reasons should I be using this feature on my account besides gaining followers & popularity?”. Well, I have a few reasons in mind that will help convince you at the end of this post & why you’ll want to be using them AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! 

Why you should start using them

Here are a few reasons why you should consider using idea pins:

• Tell a story

• Create step-by-step guides

• Show steps for a DIY project

• Even curate a collection of products, courses or freebies.

Another great thing about idea pins is that they don't disappear like IG stories. Instead, you can save them to your boards like any other pin you normally upload or if you don't want the whole story saved & then you save one page from that story instead. 

You can also find that your idea pins will be displayed in the Pinterest home feed.

Viewers can also add comments & photos to your stories just like they normally do to pins that you upload every other day as well. 

Step 1 - How to create them

First of all, you want to create your story how you would normally create a pin & that’s by clicking on the big red “+” button & clicking on “create a Idea pin”.

Step 2 - Size & format 

From there, you want to upload the image you want to use in your story. But be advised as you need to have a minimum of 2 pages to post your story & you have a maximum of 20 pages to post. You also need to make sure that your images/videos are in portrait with measurements of 900x1600 pixel size. 

You can resize your images, but it’s probably best to stick to the requirements to get the best results possible as you don’t want the resolution to look poor quality. 

The file formats that are acceptable are: BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, .mov. and .mp4

You should also know that the maximum file size for idea pins is 20MB. 

As for videos, you want they need to be anywhere between 4 seconds to 15 minutes long & the maximum file size is 2GB. To know more about the specs for video format on Pinterest, please refer to Pinterest’s Video Pin Guide.

The final step

Once your picture is uploaded, add in the title of your idea pin, what board you wish to pin it to and then add keyworded tags so your pin becomes more searchable.

After that, all you have to do is press publish & boom! You've done your first idea pin. Yass! 

Are you going to use idea pins? 

Personally, I think idea pins are going to majorly help contribute to the mass of web traffic going to websites & blogs in time to come but for now, I think it’s a great tool for growing your followers.

As it's a new feature, you've got to test out the waters with it, but I think it's a feature that's going to rapidly grow on Pinterest & become quite popular on the platform.

So I suggest you start playing around with it now because the potential growth it could bring could be ridiculous. 

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