How to be successful on Pinterest…

What makes a photo go viral on Pinterest? A picture of a celebrity, The Royal family or the latest cute pet?

Pinterest
Pinterest

If you guessed any of these, you’d be wrong. While photos of people might be the most interesting for a newspaper or magazine, it seems the same cannot be said for Pinterest.

Incredibly, it turns out the most successful Pinterest photo of all time is a picture of chef Paula Deen’s Aunt Peggy’s Tomato and Onion salad. This photo – which we have to say is a lovely pic of a bowl of food but hardly ground-breaking – has been repinned a massive 307,000 times, liked an additional 8,000 times and received a hundred comments.

Researchers – Curulate, a company that culls data from millions of pictures on Pinterest – admit this might be because of the recipe (it must be amazing…) but claim they found the key to doing well on Pinterest is not to upload photos with people in them. Their data also found the following:

* Photos with red or orange do well.
* Portrait style are more popular than horizontal photos.
* Objects are best – not people.
* Concentrate on the object – don’t include too much background.
* Extreme colours such as black and white are not so appealing. And tones of red do better than photos with tones of blue. However, Photos shouldn’t be too bright either.

It seems much of this is peculiar to Pinterest and wouldn’t work on Twitter or Facebook for example.

“We think of Facebook as a network of people, and Foursquare as a network of places. Pinterest is a network of things… and it seems like on a network of things, faces are actually a distraction,’ Curalate CEO Apu Gupta told Wired, which first published the data.

Read more and see the perfect Pinterest picture on Wired.

Alison Smith-Squire

Alison Smith-Squire is a writer, journalist and media agent selling exclusive real life stories to newspapers, magazines and TV. She owns the sell my story website Featureworld.co.uk, which was set up to help ordinary people sell their stories to the press.

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