Pin it – Longer Idea Pins from Pinterest. Will it be Any Beneficial for Marketers?

Pinterest has introduced longer video clips in its Idea Pins increasing the duration from 60 seconds to five whole minutes!

Idea Pins were introduced by Pinterest in 2021 enabling businesses to create and share long-lasting and save-able content.

Videos have been wildly successful on Pinterest. Videos are a very popular medium anyway – now with Pinterest increasing the length of videos, the impact will also see a change.

Up until now, the length of videos on Idea Pins on Pinterest has been 60 seconds. Marketers and other users have used it widely to create brand awareness, explain product features, get backlinks and drive more traffic to their websites. The full-screen presentation format has been doing really well since the launch of Idea Pin clips in 2021.

Now following the lead of TikTok, Pinterest offers a new feature for brands to increase audience engagement with their content – long-form videos. This longer format gives brands more leeway to tell their stories in more detail and expand upon key elements wherever needed.

Statistics show that people watch close to a billion videos a day on Pinterest. This highly visual platform has over 433 million users– which makes Pinterest very attractive to marketers worldwide.

Marketers know videos are critical for businesses. The rise of YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels is a vindication of this. They know video is a key channel to get the attention of visitors and tell their story in a far more convincing manner than just plain text.

However, most marketers agree that the length of a marketing video must be less than 2 minutes – with most of them agreeing that it must be about 15 to 20 seconds long.

Pinterest, with the launch of its long-form videos seems to be going an entirely different direction – and all with good reason.

While shorter formats are great for going viral and grabbing the attention of viewers, brands can thrive on the flexibility and space that the five whole minutes gives. The longer format gives brands the opportunity to provide more information and create greater engagement.

They can add more details and take customers through the various stages of the conversion funnel, which they could not do earlier, when they would grab their audience’s attention but that was it – they had to hope that they would go to the brand’s website to consume more information about their products or services.

Nissan recently created a sensational four-hour-long YouTube video about their crossover EV Ariya! With some lo-fi music in the background, the long Ariya ad has been hugely successful.

Yes! Videos convert better – YouTube and TikTok have proved that. And while the world clings on to short-form videos, Pinterest gives marketers the amazing opportunity to go the other way.

It pays to swim against the current sometimes!