Today’s episode sets out to answer the question: Does video work on Pinterest? The case study we are going to be talking about today will completely blow your mind! Hopefully, this example will also motivate you to start using video on Pinterest if you aren’t already.

If you’re looking to increase your traffic, (which we all are!) this will be a super helpful episode for you.

If you know you want to start using video on Pinterest, but don’t have the time (or desire) to do it yourself, Simple Pin can do it for you with our new Video Pin Creation Services! Send us your video content and we’ll do the rest.

Kristen McDonnell owns a company called Studio Knit, which is focused on teaching knitting techniques and projects.

She started her company a little over five years ago. She had twenty years of marketing communications experience under her belt when she started. She began with a Youtube channel in 2014, creating how-to videos. Her sister was working for the multi-channel network, where Beth, of Entertaining with Beth, was the VP of Programming!

Kristen signed on with the company and experienced great success with her knitting channel. Three years into her career, she decided to fly solo and is now 100% focused on running Studio Knit.

Does Video Work on Pinterest? A Case Study

 

Getting Started With Pinterest

Beth told Kristen that she needed to start focusing on Pinterest marketing for Studio Knit. She instructed her to listen to the SPM podcast.

Knitting is not  slam-dunk topic on Pinterest, so up to this point, her content never really took off on the platform. 

But Kristen started implementing the tips and strategies she learned on the podcast and experienced (almost immediate) growth. It was easy for her to rename boards, rearrange them, and create images since was super familiar and comfortable with graphic design. By doing all of this legwork, she created a solid foundation to market her content on Pinterest.

Within two months of putting these best practices into play, she was accepted into an ad network. She also had a post go viral about this same time. Because of all of this, she’s been able to monetize her blog.

Kristen sent us this graphic of the lifetime of her Pinterest traffic:

Even though it’s hard to tell in the graph, she did experience slow and steady growth through 2015-2016. That growth is simply overshadowed by the explosion of growth that occurred in 2017.

I always say that Pinterest is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but stories like Kristen’s are so promising because they show that if you just put in the work on the foundational practices, you can and will see growth.

Incorporating Video Into Pinterest

In 2018 when video rolled out on Pinterest, Kristen was so excited because making video had always been her thing. But she wasn’t seeing results beyond the image pin in the beginning.

Because you aren’t able to schedule video pins within Tailwind, she didn’t really pay attention to her video pins until the end of 2018. She noticed that her video pins had started to gain traction.

She had an Easter project on “How to Knit a Bunny From a Square” that was steadily rising in Google Analytics, even beyond her current seasonal content. Kristen had no idea that she had created a viral video pin!

It had been pinned the prior Easter, and now the pin had been pinned by hundreds of people with over 3 million views AND 38 people had actually responded that they made a Bunny From a Square.