Making a Viral Pin

There is so much content being published daily on Pinterest, and on average, 200 million monthly active users. That's a lot of searching of pinning happening.

In the realm of color inspiration, Pinterest is a hot spot for the ultimate collection of color schemes and palettes. Before, when I was on Tumblr, I would see photographs with color blocks on them as an inspiration palette. January of 2016 I decided it would be fun to try and make my own. At the time, I was caught up in designing graphics and layouts for a magazine.

So, I made a few pins from images I thought were Pinterest-worthy. At first, no one re-pinned them and I forgot they existed. They were lost in the Pinterest black hole of social media as far as I knew. I kept them live on my profile though just in case.

A few months later, I noticed I was getting notifications from one the pins having activity. Specifically, one of the color palettes from a photograph I took at Ecola State Park in Oregon. You can view it here. Not logging in for a while, I looked at my engagements and found it was saved around 200 times. I was so excited! Something I made was getting traction and people liked it. 

Even more exciting, as of today writing this article on March 11th, 2018 my pin now has 5,602 engagements and 1,627 saves. It's appeared on Pinterest 65,000 times. Just in the last 24 hours it was saved 63 times.

I'm sharing this because it goes to show, making content that aligns with a trend online and making it unique to your style, art, or something you've created, has power on Pinterest and any other social media platform. I recently added more color palettes to the board to help give the rest a boost and my lavender pin is the best performer and has 9 saves in just under a month.

Update September 2022:

Looking at data for the Ecola State Park Colors pin, with a slight peak in activity around August, the last 180 day impressions are 85.1k and 826 saves. After the past few years, it still holds strong as valuable content for my brand and website for traffic and awareness.