An investigation of whether Pinterest story pins with text overlay are a best practice for brands to increase engagement.
Investigating the effectiveness of story pins on Pinterest and some best practices
Beginning at its introduction in 2010, Pinterest was the leading social media platform that people could visit for fun DIY hacks, creative project ideas, and helpful how-to tutorials. This niche was threatened by the rise of TikTok and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. People were staying home and many were downloading this sensational platform that offered different video content covering similar topics. In order to stay relevant, Pinterest introduced the story pin in 2020. The story pin is a new feature to rival TikTok and helps keep users engaged with the content that Pinterest has to offer. This article will further investigate how effective some of the best practices for story pins are when it comes to companies in the e-commerce industry trying to increase user engagement.
Story Pins: Best Practices
Research found that the best practice of using text overlay helps create a more impactful story pin and leads to more user engagement. According to wave.video, this best practice is important because “you don’t lose impact, even if the viewer watches your video without sound.” They expand on the most effective methods for including text overlay: “If the Pinterest video is of you speaking, add subtitles or text overlay. If your video is instructional or listicle, add text overlay with list items.” Even Pinterest’s Best Practices page states that for story pins businesses should “start with a video on your first page to stand out in people’s feeds. Just make sure to add text overlay, since some people watch with sound off.” Although these are generally accepted as best practices, the goal of this paper is to investigate whether it increases engagement in the e-commerce industry.
Methodology
To investigate this, I first randomly sampled 40 story pins from five of the biggest e-commerce companies on Pinterest (Ruggable, Fenty Beauty, Etsy, Bustle, and The Container Store). Twenty of the story pins included text overlay and the other twenty did not have any text overlay. The story pins that included text overlay were transcribed by hand and all data were coded by me and an independent coder. The codebook below includes the different codes used and the meaning associated with each code.
After refining the codebook several times and having different coders code the data, we were able to have a Cohen’s Kappa of .712 meaning that the reliability of the codebook was not perfect but was reliable enough for the purposes of this blog.
Results
The figure below shows the comparative means of coded story pins with text overlay and those without. Simply looking at the means of different metrics of user engagement, it is clear that story pins without text overlay generally perform better than story pins with text overlay. Some areas where story pins with text overlay performed better were product promotion and the other category.
Story pins with text overlay in the product promotion and other categories provided quick descriptions on the products and miscellaneous topics that they were promoting. One of the reasons why these story pins might have performed better could be due to the fact that users might just want a quick interaction with the pin which story pins without text overlay might not be able to provide. Below is an example of a product promotion story pin with text overlay.
The description is concise and provides enough information for the user to understand the pros and cons of the product while minimizing the amount of time that users need to spend on the pin.
On the other hand, story pins in the tutorial and call to action category performed better with text overlay. For tutorials, users might expect to spend a little more time with the pin and actually experience each step of the tutorial process. The following example shows how story pins with text overlay could fail at being as instructive as story pins without text overlay.
In this example, the pin includes a text overlay that explains what the user would need to do to successfully blot a soiled area of a rug. While the instructions given by the text are not inherently bad, there is a better way of showing users how the process needs to be performed such as visualizing the step and minimizing any distractions that could draw attention away from that visualization.
For story pins that include a call to action, users need to be motivated and inspired to take action. This would require an experienced writer who can convey the right emotions to move someone to take action which can be incredibly difficult to accomplish. However, in actual speech these emotions can be conveyed through intonation and pitch which can be completely missed out on when those words are written rather than spoken. This is probably the biggest reason why story pins without text overlay performed better in this category.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this investigation has shown that the best practice of including text overlay in videos is not the best practice for all situations. For product promotion and miscellaneous story pin topics, text overlay can provide better descriptions than audio can and provide more information about the product. Categories such as call to actions and instructional story pins have consistently proved to perform better when text overlay was not included. If you are interested in expanding your business and increasing engagement with your story pins, I’d recommend excluding text overlay for story pins that explains a process and invite users to take action and including text overlay for pins that promote a product and for pins that don’t fit into any of the other categories.