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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about using collages on Pinterest and this podcast was created in partnerships with Pinterest. I am currently one of the six educators on their Pinterest Educator team. They have helped me gather information, resources and tools to help bring you this accurate and up to date teaching on Pinterest. Collages. What are collages, you might ask? Well, actually I previously recorded a podcast on this with a workaround our team had found using Pinterest sister app called Shuffles. So business owners were asking us about the relevancy as well as the workflow for linking their products. Was it something they were going to use in their business? How did it work? We had a lot of questions, so at that time this seemed to be the only way. However, now we can do this on Pinterest. In fact, you might see it in your Pinterest app. At the bottom when you hit the plus sign, you'll see pin collage board so you can create them in the app. So I want this episode to give you information you need to decide if collages in that pin format are right for your own Pinterest strategy. Whether you're ready to try it or maybe you are just new to Pinterest or wanting to stay informed. This is going to be for you. Also, I like to make this note for people who are beginners listening to my podcast. This is more of an advanced feature, so if you're just getting started, by all means play around with anything that you see. In fact, when I do any teaching webinars or either in person or one of the things I tell people is to use the app. If you don't know if Pinterest is right for your marketing, use it for 10 minutes, play around with it, see how it works, see if you can start to get the vibe for it and how it would work for your marketing. This is the same with collages. See if you can get the vibe for it, see if it will work or not work for your marketing. I'm also going to be sharing a lot of helpful links in today's episode. So make sure you scroll down below in the app, wherever you're listening or even on YouTube. So we'll make sure that you have that there. You can also go back and listen to my previous podcast about the Shuffles app. It is still around so you can still go listen to it. So go ahead and check that out as well. But again, all the Links will be down below in the description. Okay, let's dive in. So what are Pinterest collages? So here's what Pinterest says. So I'm going to give you what they say, and then I'm going to give you my take. Collages are an immersive, interactive format composed of cutouts that users can tap on and engage with. It's like expressive and customizable miniature boards. Collages are playful and an imaginative way to put pins together. You can cut out, combine any visual element on Pinterest to design and curate your favorite ideas all in one place. So what is a cutout? A cutout essentially allows users to isolate a particular part of the picture, think a lamp in a living room, and save a portion of the pin that they're interested in. A cutout will always maintain pin details from the original pin. That means if you cut out that lamp and you put it on your collage, it will still be linked back to that original pin. So it's not like you would lose that. I've had some people give me some worries that what if I lose that original pin? I want to be able to know where to see it again. Just know it will always be attributed to the original pin and its owner. Cutouts created from product pins will display product details like price, availability, and can also be used to create shoppable collages. One thing to note, and this did happen with my product tagging episodes, not all shopping collages are available, but only where the those features are available on the platform. So just know some of these features might only be in the US and in Canada or in maybe some European countries. I know that somebody asked me about product tagging in Australia and it's not there yet. But just know that these are being tested and then will eventually be rolled out. So, so here's my take. I see Pinterest collages as like visual collections created by combining multiple images, graphics, text and design elements into a single cohesive piece of content that's specifically optimized for sharing on Pinterest. They're essentially like digital mood boards or compilations that bring together related ideas, products or concepts in this really esthetically pleasing format. These collages serve multiple purposes on Pinterest that allow creators to showcase several related items like all at once. Think multiple outfit ideas, home decor inspiration, or like recipe variations rather than posting like individual pins. It makes them highly engaging because users get more value from inspiration from this rather than a single pin. So I'm going to zoom out just a tiny bit. So when I think of collages, I think of them being really helpful for somebody who's trying to conceptualize something. And you can do that on a personal level through a collage or you can conceptualize for other people. So if you are a business owner who is in the home decor or the fashion space and or even an affiliate marketer and you're wanting to put together an ideal outfit and you don't want to use AI, you don't want to use yourself, but you want to kind of layer it on an image. This allows you to pull together a top, a jacket, some earrings, a necklace and some pants and some shoes. Instead of having those all individual pins, you can, you now get to pull them all together. We're already seeing collages being used by some brands who are testing them, especially on the ad side. So think about, think about them as you're listening to how you would frame this up to create inspiration for your end user. That's what I'll leave you with here. So let's talk about the types of collages. So common types include fashion collages which might show complete outfits, seasonal trends. There might be home decor collages featuring like room inspiration or color schemes. Food collages might display like recipe collections. Think like all pumpkin, right? If you're a pumpkin hater, think all apple pie or maybe meal prep ideas that you could pull into one. Or maybe lifestyle collages that might combine quotes, images and products around a particular theme. Right now Pinterest is saying that collages are saved at a 2x rate of other pin types. I'm going to link for you an example here. You're going to see it on the screen. Here is a profile. We're going to link actually the profile for collages from Pinterest for you in the description below. But I want to share this screenshot here of an example of like a party. Somebody is pulling together a 30th birthday party theme. They have drinks, they've pulled into it, they have the type of lipstick, they're going to wear, the cake, maybe a party hat and then it's going to be disco themed. That is kind of a way that you can pull together collages to have it showcase something that you're going to do. So then why would you use them? Here are some best use cases so you can start to get your creative juices flowing. For businesses, collages are incredibly efficient for showcasing product ranges. Think you have a sandal and you have multiple colors in that sandal. An E Commerce clothing brand can display an entire seasonal collection on one pin rather than a board with multiple product pins. Or a home decor company can show how their products work together in different room settings, which gives the potential customers a broader view of what the business offers and increases the likelihood they'll find something appealing. So Pinterest collages also excel at storytelling or lifestyle marketing. Instead of just showing a product, businesses can demonstrate how it fits into their customers lives. Like a fitness brand might create a collage showing workout gear, healthy meals, motivational quotes or exercise routines, positioning their products with that complete lifestyle rather than just isolated items. And I think that's the theme you need to hit on here, is that you are pulling things together for people instead of having them pull together bits and pieces themselves. The other use case could also be seasonality. So thinking about how you might pull together your products, I think you know what I'm thinking of actually there's those, there's those videos on Instagram. Sometimes they get me every time and people think I'm nuts. But it's these Amazon products and they're pulled together in a theme, whether it's like a car or a kitchen counter. And there's so much ASMR going on, it's. They're annoying, right? I know many people think these videos are annoying, but these affiliate marketers are showing the way that this product can be used. And sometimes there's a theme of seasonality to it. Using collages for this purpose is a lightweight, low cost way to help build out like your seasonal or trending content strategy without having to produce new photos. Because we all know taking more pictures is a lot of work. So instead of taking new photos, putting them into a board, you can put it into a collage. The collage tool format is also a great way to visualize ideas like bringing things to life like outfits, outfit inspiration or fashion. So you can take different elements from pins and bring them all together to see how it would work instead of looking them at a board separately. So how can they be created? So there are some technical pieces that I'm going to walk you through, but obviously if you're listening to the podcast, you might go have to listen to the video. We're going to put some images on the video of kind of the walkthrough so you know how it will work. But here's an important part. Collages can only be created on iOS or Android, not on desktop, which is hard because some of us Create on desktop because it's easier, we can see the screen, but in this case you have to create on your phone. So just so you know. So step number one on the main navigation. Users can access the Collage Composer tool by tapping the plus button in the navigation bar. That's right at the bottom it says pin collage board. Or while you're browsing Pinterest, you can add pins and cutouts to your collages. Simply tap the little scissor icon on the pin to create a cutout and add it to your collage. This involves a lot of like pinching and scratch, squeezing them, things like that. So it's going to take a little bit of time to use it. But once you do, you'll get the handle of trying to squeeze down on a cutout. Then you select add to collage when you're saving. If you're on your profile, all published and draft collages can be found in your collages entry point on your profile. The your collages board entry point is private. This is only visible to you. That's great because you can draft for a while instead of everybody seeing what you're doing in real time. Also in the blog post, I'm going to do a whole detailed picture as well. If you don't want to go to YouTube, you can find that by going to simplepinmedia.com434 so for the plus at the bottom of your screen, select collage, find the cutout. Or to find and add cutouts to a collage, sorry, tap plus in the collage tool. You can also browse pins and cutouts inspired by your interest. You can search Pinterest to access your boards and your saved pins. Okay, so once you've selected this, you can add the auto detected object as a cutout and edit that selection. You can also upload images from your device too. I have accidentally uploaded pictures of my cats. So if you really want to create something that's super custom, you can certainly do that. Then you can customize from there by adding text, drawings, background color, and then publish your collage as a pin. Make sure you fill out all the details, pin title, pin description, all of that. And then voila, you have a collage. So again, I realize that, like, I'm speaking this and it's a little bit hard to follow, but essentially it's plus collage and then you're kind of building pieces like, think of yourself as like pulling these tiny cutouts all together. It does have a learning curve, so you're going to have to play around with it a little bit to see how you like it. So what would be included in a collage as you create them? So one of the things that people had a lot of question about was links. So the key to links is ensuring that you are using the original pins with the link. You want to create your cutouts. So if you want to do a collage of a bunch of products that are shoppable, simply ensure that you're using the product pin for each product cutout so that when the end user taps on that cutout, it pulls up the information, they can see the product info again. This can all be done on mobile. It's pretty easy. Doesn't require an additional step to take the product or add the link. It just is grabbing the original information from the pin. Another idea is to repurpose like an existing evergreen content into a collage. Maybe you have an older blog post that's doing well. You could kind of like reformat it into a collage. So this is what else you can include in a collage, essentially. Here are some other features that you'll find in there. Something called remix. You can able enable remixing. This is actually kind of funny. Like you can inspire your audience. Not funny in a bad way, but funny in like a cool way. You can enable the remixing of your collages and inspire your audience to use your design as a template for their own collage. Each remix is attributed and linked to the original owner, increasing your reach. So think about it this way. If you created a cool collage of. I'm thinking of this on the fly, so it's not coming to me immediately, but let's say your audience has gone nuts for this summer sandal and you want to show how this summer sandal can be used in a particular outfit, right? Well, you could leave some of it. Like they could remix it by changing up the outfit or changing up anything to go with the sandals. It could. This, I haven't seen this walked out. So I'm kind of doing this on the fly. So I guess I would say remix is a way to like engage your audience. And it might take some creative juices in order to get that to have some lift. But I want to call out that you can call to action your audience to remix. If anybody does that or has done that, email me. I'd love to see it because I think there could be some fun ways that you use it. Sharing it. This is also fun. After creating it, you can download it into different formats. And then they add this like animation. It's like time lapse or crumble it up like a piece of paper. You could reshare it to other platforms and your Pinterest username will be attached to. If you don't want it moving, if you don't want it like a video aspect to like building of the collage, you can download it and share it as a static image or a link as well. So those are just a few other features. Okay. Our feedback, Like, I wanted to have some real time, real world feedback about this, so I had my team make a collage. I had my daughter make a collage. She's 19. And I had my really good friend Katie make a collage. She is a Pinterest power user. So I'm going to give you the three of their kind of feedback as to how this worked for them from a business perspective. We created our own collage. Our team did have trouble with a cutout tool and it can be hard to find specific pins you want to use. But like, once you make a cutout, you can use that again and again. So if you have a set of products, you can just make that cutout once and you can use it across multiple verticals. I'm going to show our example here on the screen of our pin here. We grabbed three of our digital products and pulled them all together. So it took a little bit of time. It was bumpy. But that's with anything new. You're going to have to. You're going to have to work through it, right, and see how it works for you. My daughter, who's 19, she is on Pinterest literally all the time. She loves to use Pinterest to gather ideas for art. And she kind of felt like collages didn't feel intuitive to her workflow. She said that maybe a good use case was for like bedroom inspiration, but for her, she felt like boards already served her need, so she didn't need to add that layer. And it didn't make sense to her as to how she could do it now, but maybe in the future. I also pulled my IG community, Instagram community. I was actually surprised to see that 23% of people are already using collages. I'm like, well, that's pretty cool. Maybe it was because I did that podcast before. Maybe they're still using it via shuffles. Not totally sure. Another user said that they used to create collages in another program before the format came to Pinterest. So this to them was like an answer. To so many things to pull ideas together for their concept. And instead of like extracting into another program and then like saving it to Pinterest, now she could have fun pulling it all together. A friend of mine said the same thing about like the layer tool. I think it's like it's in progress. It's really doing as everything right. Like when any feature comes out on a platform and it's new, it has to iterate and evolve and the more we use it, the more feedback we can give about what would be better and how to make it work. So all that to say we're still testing it. I'm still asking people in the real world if they're on Pinterest, if they use them to get me their feedback. This could even be a great thing. You could ask your audience if you know you have a high percentage of Pinterest traffic coming to your website and you have an email list, ask them in the email say, hey, do you use collages? This is actually a new tool. Not sure if you knew about it, but let me know if you use it. Here's my my example and then let them remix it or whatever. So that leads me to the question like, are Pinterest collages right for you? It is always worth the experimentation. I know some people are hesitant with new tools, and since platforms do evolve, features change and things are retired, it is sometimes a little bit hard to embrace new things. I understand that. I've been a little bit gun shy of things in the past. This is a recent TechCrunch article I thought was really good. They said though collages require more work than simply saving a pin to a Pinterest board, the feature is picking up steam. The company told investors in its Q1 2024 earnings call. Users are roughly three times more likely to save collage pins versus other pins on Pinterest, and a significant portion contain clickable products. This is what CEO of Pinterest Bill Ready said. We're also continuing to see collages gain traction with Gen Z, who are nearly 70% of collage creators. Furthermore, improving the actionability of pins is another core tenet of improving user satisfaction, deepening engagement, and growing monthly active users. So while Pinterest internal metrics really show strong collage performance, businesses should always track their own analytics to verify these results for their specific audience and industry. The platform provides detailed analytics tools to measure engagement rates, saves and click through rates for different content types. That being said, do your own research. Go into this, play around. I have my phone here, pick up your phone, pick up your app, turn it on and play around with it just like I did, just like my daughter did. And two friends and our team. We want to see is this a way to elevate our content and our products to get in front of more people on Pinterest? So what do you think? Do you plan to test out collages on Pinterest or wait a little bit and watch how people are using them? If you have any questions, thoughts, feedback or want to share your experience, Simply email us. Helloimpleplepenmedia.com we read all of those emails and we really, really would love to hear your use cases so that we can share your story or we can share your story internally. We don't necessarily have to share it on podcast or on YouTube, but it gives us more of an understanding as to how people are using it. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening.