Today we are going to be talking about a Pinterest feature that isn’t regularly used – Pinterest carousel pins. 

Pinterest carousel is a feature that seasoned marketers can test out after they’ve set up a great Pinterest marketing foundation. It’s something optional that you can explore once you’ve mastered the basics. 

If you’re still working on setting up that strong foundation, or are working on growing your Pinterest marketing, make sure you’ve downloaded the Simple Pin Pinterest Planner. It’s over 20 pages of monthly trends, stat tracking, checklists, and more. And it’s free! 

What Is A Pinterest Carousel Pin? 

According to Pinterest:

A carousel is a pin with multiple images. Carousels are a great way to showcase different features of a product, advertise multiple products at once, or tell your brand story in chapters.

People see the carousels in their home feed just like they would any other pin. 

They can swipe through the different carousel images (called “cards”) directly from their feed. They can also tap on the carousel and swipe through each card to its corresponding URL, essentially swiping through the different landing pages. 

When someone saves a carousel, they save the entire pin, including all the cards within it. 

Keep in mind that the pinner might not know to swipe when they encounter a carousel pin. You need to communicate to the pinner that they need to swipe. 

Why You Should Test Pinterest Carousels? 

This is not a major feature of Pinterest. In fact, it was a feature that, until recently, was only available to promoted pin advertisers. I also don’t believe that this feature will drive a lot of traffic.

I do think it’s good to test it out these types of Pinterest features every once in a while, for those of you who are seasoned marketers. It’s a great way to diversify your strategy. 

Here at Simple Pin, we’ve added a UTM tracking code to our carousels so that we can report back about whether or not they are working for us. We’ll be able to see if anyone is clicking on the carousel or onto our site by viewing the results in our Google Analytics. 

Carousel pins are also a great way to display groups of products. 

If you’re a product seller and want to show multiple views or colors, this is a great way to showcase your products. You can also test this out if you have a blog post with multiple options for a recipe, or a variety of steps in a DIY project that you’d like to break down. 

We will have a podcast in the next few weeks about Pinterest Story Pins. One key distinguishing feature between story pins and carousels is that you cannot link a story pin, but you can link a carousel pin.

How to Create a Pinterest Carousel Pin

The instructions to Pinterest carousels state that you can only use them for ads (i.e., promoted pins), but that’s not true. You can use them organically. 

To get started, have all of your images downloaded to your computer so that you can upload them all at once. When you upload, you will be prompted to create a carousel or a collage. Choose “create a carousel”:

Once you choose the carousel option, you’ll be able to reorder your images and choose the links you want to attach to the images:

If you are a product seller who has a category page, you can link to that main category page instead of choosing multiple links.