Finding New Ways to Tell Stories with Pinterest

Key Takeaways

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Trend Highlight — The Changing Pinterest Landscape: With COVID-19 changing the way everyone around the world travels in 2020 onwards, Pinterest noticed a rise in opportunities for the automotive industry. Noting increases in car-relevant searches over 2020 into 2021, research shows that many users are flocking to Pinterest to build car ideas. The trends show that there is a higher affinity for people to get out of their environments by booking road trip based travel. Pinterest estimates that about 40% of their users in the United States make over $100K annually, building a platform of consumers with a higher purchasing power. In Australia, 56% of Pinterest users are coming to the platform to build ideas for vehicle purchases. In Canada, the top increases in search terms related to cars YoY are “dog car seats” and “car survival kits” inferring a rise in outdoor activities and long distance road trips. 

Content Tactic — Build an Ecosystem on Your Profile: Build content on your profile that keeps users coming back to gather helpful information and increased engagement. Honda takes this approach through heavy content creation for their Story Pins that don’t feature click-through links to their website. Instead, they build strong stories through a series of tiles that offer advice and actionable ideas of how Pinterest users can spend time with their cars. Their content is high quality, uses captions to build the story line and long descriptions to provide additional information. Honda uses a range of imagery, animation and video footage to capture their stories in different ways. Most of the time this content hasn’t been repurposed or saved on any other social media platforms. Stories with long descriptions garnered an average of +45% more engagement than posts without. 

Content Tactic — Diversify Pins: While Chevrolet is experimenting with Story Pins, they focus the majority of their content on traditional Pins. They use these to repurpose blog content optimized for Pinterest. Instead of keeping viewers on their profile, they often direct them off the page to their website where they can explore the blog content further with more details on their car models. Chevrolet maintains a slightly different brand image on Pinterest, experimenting with typographies, graphics and general content themes that differ from what is portrayed on their Instagram and other social media platforms. 

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Pinterest has been a growing platform for many years, attracting new niches and a range of users across the globe.

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In November 2020, Pinterest hosted a seminar to address the rising opportunities for the automotive industry on their platform.

*The study focused primarily on a sample of Australian & New Zealand Pinterest users.

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Outdoor Junkies and Rural Tourists were identified as a rapidly growing persona on Pinterest as part of their Travel Industry report. These personas rely on vehicles for smooth journeys.

*Discover how search categories with intent related to cars are up YoY below.

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At the beginning of 2021, Pinterest launched new insights on the “Pinterest Predicts” platform that highlights travel trends based on targeted growth YoY for specific search terms.

In 2021, cars will become the new “third space” for everything from date nights to man caves.

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Pinterest has evolved to a preferred set of sizing and lengths for their Pins. Optimizing to meet the criteria will build a stronger user experience.

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As of April 2021, there are only a few automotive brands with a presence in North America on Pinterest. The current leader is Honda with 40.8K followers.

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Automotive Pinterest accounts for the Canadian region are less developed than their American counterparts. The only accounts actively saving Pins are Nissan, Infiniti and Lexus.

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Out of all the automotive accounts, Honda and Chevrolet are the only brands experimenting with Story Pins (in Beta) featuring entirely custom content for Pinterest*.

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In January 2021, Honda created a Story Pin to cater to the music lovers on their channel. Each story features a different genre and music to go along with it.

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Posted in March 2021, the “Get Ready to Adventure with Honda” Story Pin features a clear theme and visuals that cater to inspire road trip and adventure enthusiasts.

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Honda further builds personal connections by linking near-death car accidents to the stability of their vehicles, bringing everyday people into the mix to tell their stories.

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Honda’s Story Pins use a beginning to end approach to build information across tiles. They include the community around them to produce high quality and optimized content.

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On select Story Pins, Honda has tested adding extra text in the description with useful and actionable tips directly related to their title and content.

*Honda’s Story Pins garner 33 average engagements, however posts with descriptions have received +45% engagements on average.

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Starting in March 2021, Chevrolet posted two animated story pins to promote their Suburban and Tahoe models in different road trip scenarios.

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The majority of Chevrolet’s content focuses on traditional Pins. These create a different approach to relating with customers, directing users to the website instead of keeping them on Pinterest.

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Chevrolet repurposes blog content for Pins that lead viewers to the original post on the website. The content focuses on a person and their experience with a specific car model.

The main focus of this series is to demonstrate the level of ease that Chevrolet provides for different kinds of people with different priorities. They also include how people personalize their Chevrolet to build intimate examples of people’s daily routines with their cars.