In order to better understand how brands can drive consumer engagement with images, Curalate‘s data science team reviewed over a half million images on Pinterest, and examined 30 different visual characteristics — including textures, colors, and presence of faces — to learn how they impact social actions such as Pins, Repins and Likes.
As consumers continue to flock to visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, marketers need to learn to market without words. This type of data is a major first step in helping brands and retailers predict which images will prompt consumer action before they share images across their social platforms.
Below, we’ve included a few important highlights and an infographic with full details on our findings.
People like colorful images, but moderation matters.
- The most repinned images have multiple colors: Images with multiple dominant colors have 3.25 times more repins per image than images with a single dominant color.
- Very light and very dark images are not repinned as often. In fact, the repinning rate for images of medium lightness is 20 times higher than for images that are mostly black, and eight times higher than images that are mostly white.
- Images in the middle between highly desaturated (e.g. black and white) and highly saturated perform better. Images that are 50 percent saturated have four times more repins than images that are 100 percent saturated, and 10 times more repins than images that are totally desaturated.
- Red images get more repins than blue images. What’s more, images that are red, orange and brown receive roughly twice as many repins than images that are blue.
Get close and personal – people pay attention to details.
- Images that contain less than 30 percent background (e.g. whitespace) are repinned the most.
- Repins drop off by 2X to 4X for images containing 40 percent or more of background area.
- Brand images without faces receive 23 percent more repins. Less than 1/5 of images on Pinterest today have the presence of faces.
Now that there’s an understanding of what imagery generates maximum engagement on Pinterest, why not apply these findings to your larger digital strategy? Here are three best practices to go from beautiful photography to a full fledged Pinterest campaign.
PRESS COVERAGE
- Wired: This Is the Perfect Pinterest Picture, According to Science
- Business Insider: Eight Tips for Creating More Effective Pinterest Images
- Digiday: How Different Image Characteristics Drive Engagement on Pinterest
- Mediapost: Pinterest Images With Multiple Colors Up Repins
- Internet Retailer: More Colors Attract More Attention from Pinterest Users
- Search Engine Watch: New Pinterest Research Shows Which Images Get the Most Engagement