Artists, why you should (and shouldn't) be using Pinterest.

My on/off relationship with social media.

I wrote recently about how I left(ish) Instagram. It was actually part of a wider social media culling that saw me give up on Cara, Facebook—Twitter was long gone—and Pinterest. But Pinterest is an odd one…

The thing with Pinterest is, it’s not actually a social media site. Not really. It may have introduced certain features to try and sell itself as such, but it’s essentially a search engine. And a significant one at that. I’ve heard it quoted several times that Pinterest is the world’s second biggest search engine following Google. I’m not entirely sure how they’re quantifying that or whether it’s true, but it certainly could be. If Pinterest isn’t the second, it’s surely up there in the top three? Four?

And if you’re a small business, an artist, writer or maker with things to share with the world, why wouldn’t you want to be part of the second (or third?) biggest search engine?

Why you should be using Pinterest

There are so many things to love about Pinterest. It’s simple navigability, the ease with which you can save the things you like and curate your own library of images under various themes. The option to share those collections or keep them private. I’ve been using Pinterest for many years and currently have almost 6,000 pins saved to 87 different boards. (I was genuinely shocked when I just totted up that second number.)

I have boards on everything from handmade Christmas decorations to cute rats. They provide inspiration for my work, with boards about specific art techniques, colour palettes, mood boards for particular projects and thousands of pins that are simply illustrations I like. I also have a number of boards that provide ideas for meals, knitting patterns, my ideal capsule wardrobe or exercise routines I’ll never do but having saved them, I feel inherently fitter.

In the last 18 months, I started taking Pinterest seriously as a way to promote my artwork. In that time I went from having 126 monthly impressions to 90,000, and obviously other metrics such as engagement and outbound clicks increased by a similar magnitude. And it was relatively easy. I simply posted one image every day. Pinterest allows you to schedule posts up to 30 days in advance. So once a month I spent perhaps an hour uploading the images and writing a brief caption and alt text, saving them to different boards to mix things up and then I forgot about it until the following month.

Finding 30 images to schedule is not as difficult as it might sound either, because you can repurpose pictures. If I have a new print to share, for example, I can share the finished print, a close up of it, a mock up of it in a frame on a wall, process shots of me painting it or perhaps an image with text overlay announcing the new design. (Apparently Pinterest’s algorithm favours images with logos or text on.) Furthermore you can share the same image more than once. I usually leave a gap of 30-60 days before pinning it to a different board. Having a number of related boards, such as illustration, watercolour techniques, picture books, not only allows you to repurpose your images but is exactly the kind of thing you should be doing to build followers and increase visibility.

So, unlike certain other platforms (I’m looking at you ‘Gram), it’s still possible to grow and reach new audiences on Pinterest. The other major thing Pinterest has in its favour is the fact your images are ‘evergreen’. Post to Instagram and you have less than a day before your image fades into obscurity (which is why consistent posting is key). On Facebook it’s a mere 20 minutes, similar to X. While the lifespan of an image shared to Pinterest is closer to 4 months!* But remember, Pinterest is really a search engine in disguise. That means your pin could turn up in a search result and direct someone to your website, blog post or YouTube video (which, by the way, is similarly evergreen) a year from now.

Why you should avoid Pinterest

Of all the social media sites, Pinterest has been the one to drive most traffic to my Etsy shop and website. It’s also probably the easiest to post to consistently. Last year I would have encouraged anyone to take the time to use it. But this year, I haven’t uploaded a single image to Pinterest.

And its simply because, like so many other social media places we once enjoyed, Pinterest is becoming unusable. Where once my home feed was full of beautiful illustrations and the occasional rat photograph (Pinterest used to be very good at showing you what you wanted to see), now it’s full of adverts and AI. Amazon actually started advertising on Pinterest in spring 2023. I have no idea what’s changed recently but there’s definitely a very noticeable surge in Amazon ads flooding the home feed. Annoyingly, they’re not always obvious either, until you click on one to expand it in the hope of seeing the art work in progress more clearly, only to be taken directly to an Amazon listing for a desk lamp. It makes browsing through the feed far less pleasurable than it once was.

Then there’s the amount of crap (and it is all crap) AI imagery flooding the platform. It’s not just in the area of art or illustration where you might expect it but ‘photographs’ of animals, landscapes and buildings, crochet patterns, food, the lot. Last year when I was considering cutting my hair, I searched for short curly hairstyles. The majority of images I received in return were AI. Some are harder to spot than others. One showed a very cute hair cut but closer inspection revealed the woman wearing it had terrifyingly small ears, eyes that were near mirror images of one another, down to each lash and her earrings had been cleverly pierced through her hair rather than her flesh (probably on account of her freakishly small ears).

I think it should go without saying that, as an artist, I don’t want anything to do with AI imagery, and don’t particularly want to use a platform that’s full of it. But there’s another reason artists should be wary of using Pinterest. In the past, I would put together mood boards on Pinterest for certain projects. Some images would be about the overall mood or the colour palette, but there’d often be reference images of animals or landscapes in there. I like to think I know enough about animals, their behaviour and anatomy, to spot an AI image, but for many artists, particularly when starting out, that won’t be the case. And I’d now advise against using Pinterest images for reference purposes.** This video from SamDoesArts quite nicely illustrates this problem.

So I’ve probably ended my long-term relationship with Pinterest. It’s hard to see how they can tackle the amount of AI imagery on their site (if they even want to) and with the amount of adverts taking up space, it’s just not enjoyable anymore. But, if you are an artist and you’re wondering where to invest your precious time when it comes to sharing your work online, Pinterest could be worth it. Just don’t rely on it for reference imagery.

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* Based on figures from LinkedIn article from June 2024, but comparable to other reports.

**Obviously the photographs and artwork on Pinterest is covered by copyright laws. I’m specifically talking about using images as references for studies, sketches, warm-up exercises and so on. If you want to produce artwork based on someone else’s photograph, look for royalty-free or licensing websites.