When Best Practices Conflict: Marketing eBay Items on Pinterest

This week, Curalate published "The Perfect Pinterest Pin: How to Optimize Your Images for Maximum Engagement on Pinterest".  It's a great article, with extremely useful insight into what characteristics will make an image more likely to be re-pinned.

If we are using Pinterest to market our brands and products, we need to know this information.

For me, the most stunning fact revealed was that images with stark backgrounds (such as all white, catalog style) are much less likely to be re-pinned.  Here is the dilemma:  For selling on eBay, having a stark background (all white) actually gives you higher placement in Cassini search results!

I've devised the following work-around, which should let you maximize photos on each platform.  

• First, load the item on eBay with the pictures we normally would have used on eBay (the one with the clean background). 
• Next, when we go to promote on Pinterest, we upload the Pinterest-optimized photo to Pinterest using the "add a pin" feature.
• Last, edit the pin to include a manual link which points back to the item in your eBay store.
  

Here is an example.  These two photos are of the same Tadashi dress.  The photo on the left would be the ideal eBay gallery photo with a simple, clean white background. However, the photo on the right (model Paloma Dominguez, photographer Lee Sterling Photography) would be better suited for Pinterest sharing.

You should be aware that in using this approach (and not pinning directly from eBay) we are disabling the new rich pin feature - but is this a bad thing? The rich pins are likely to decrease our Pinterest click-through rates because they include the price and availability of our items right on the pin. Disabling rich pins in this way, for now, might actually be to the seller's advantage.

If you are using Pinterest for the social media marketing of your business, I highly encourage you to read the full Curalate article and learn more.