Create Impressive and Attractive Pinterest Board Covers

Whether you’re trying to drive more traffic to your blog or business website, Pinterest is the place to be. It’s no secret that Pinterest is a huge resource. There are currently over 175 million people actively using Pinterest for ideas and inspiration. 87% of those people have actually purchased products based on pins. Pinterest is a traffic goldmine, and it’s more important than ever to get your pins and boards looking their top-notch. So having amazing-looking Pinterest board covers, in my opinion, is a must.

We’ve talked about the importance of not over-branding before, as well as brand consistency. The same rules apply for your Pinterest presence. In addition to creating branded pins, you can create custom covers for all of your boards. This is one of the best ways to showcase your brand on Pinterest. Your main page will look more organized. Designing Pinterest board covers with your brand’s color palette and unique fonts will make you look uber-professional, too.

Do You Actually Need Pinterest Board Cover Photos?

You don’t necessarily need to create pins just for your custom Pinterest board covers unless you really want to. These can be updated once a year or once every so often. You can take your best-designed and most popular pin and use that for your board cover, as well. Using a similar color or theme for each board cover is a must here.

Pinterest board covers and board cover design has been a hot topic issue for many Pinterest experts and gurus. Some will say they’re not important, others say they have some importance, and others claim that they’re super important.

My brand has a certain esthetic. It’s a Nordic minimalist style, filled with a few pretty styled stock photos. I like to keep my boards organized, clean, and stylish. Having a minimalist board cover look helps me achieve that goal. I’ve also tested two separate Pinterest accounts with board covers, and one without, and found that the one with the esthetic board covers performs better for getting Pinterest followers than one that does not.

How To Create A Custom Pinterest Board Cover For Your Brand

On Pinterest, you can’t create a big cover image/graphic to show off the board contents or concepts. You can also share the mood of your brand like you can on Twitter on Facebook. This is how to impress your followers! Create a consistent look to your boards that will also beautifully showcase your brand.

I use a square Instagram-size image on Pinterest for my board covers. It helps me keep everything centered, so I don’t have to make adjustments.

Design your board cover using the colors, fonts and any other design elements that are part of your brand.

You don’t have to worry about getting too detailed because it’s a small graphic on Pinterest. It will show up with a collection of other boards. Come up with something that you like and that uses your design elements. It will then communicate what the Pinterest board is all about.

What will have this have power is it’s use repeatedly on the page.

Once you have your design, download it (button top right) and save it as a high-quality PNG in a folder on your computer. Then, upload to the board and save it as the cover.

Here’s a quick list of what to do in case you want to learn how to create Pinterest board covers:

1. Open Canva (free) and create a new document, specifically, Instagram.
2. Place your image or text into the document.
3. Label your file name with SEO-friendly keywords for Pinterest in the file name (I use this method across the board for Google, too).
4. Download as either as JPG or PNG file. PNG files are typically higher quality, so that’s the file type I recommend.
5. Upload the image as a Pinterest pin. Pin it to the board it applies to.
6. Then, open up your Pinterest board, edit it, and change the cover setting to your new image.

While you’re in there – you might as well update the name and description of your board (if it needs it – you’re always looking for ways to keep having your brand be consistent everywhere).

Make sure to include key words that people might search for when looking for the type of content that you’ll be curating for this board.

A few thoughts – if you don’t want to go through the extra steps of creating a custom graphic for each of your boards, you could just do this for each board on your Pinterest page, selecting the pin/image that you feel best communicates the vibe and message of your brand.

Once you have saved the pin as your cover – it will take you back to the board edit screen. Again, hit save.

Changing, Swapping Year-to-Year

Voila! You’ve updated your images, and you’re ready to roll to swap out all the other ones, too. If you’re like me, and want to change out your style once in a while, I recommend swapping out your board tiles (aka, covers) once every year. Any more than that and you’ll be spending a lot of time uploading images and tweaking your boards.

But then again, it’s a good time to update your keywords or keyword phrases in your Pinterest boards, too. Doing a board cleanse every once in a while for outdated pins or pins that are no longer relevant to your brand’s work or audience is a novel idea, as well. Custom Pinterest board covers take a few hours do to, so it’s just a matter of how much time you want to spend on them per year.

One year you might want to have images; other years you might want to have text with plain backgrounds for a more cleaner, less-cluttered look. Or, you could always do a combination and see how that looks.

The thing with updating board covers is you have to do a bunch of them to try them out so see what the full panel of boards will look like when you’re done. You might have a great idea, and then do the full project, only to realize that as a combination board view, it looks terrible!

So start out with a collection of board covers and test it out by looking at your Pinterest board view collection first before committing to a board cover style concept.

Pinterest Marketing

Want to learn more about Pinterest marketing? Check out my book on Pinterest. By following some of my tips and tricks for Pinterest marketing, you’ll be growing your account and website traffic in a flash.

Here are some other Pinterest tips you might be interested in, listed below. These have to do with branding and board content, so you can get a better idea of what you need to do to properly grow your Pinterest account.

Be sure to read more up on Pinterest marketing, as well, because there’s a lot to know about setting yourself up for success. Pinterest also changes every quarter with something new or a fresh element of focus, so you’ll want to keep tabs on updates and changes.

Parting Thoughts

There will always be other Pinterest marketing professionals who think that board covers don’t matter. Just know, they do. These same people who don’t think Pinterest board covers matter…. also have Pinterest board covers. Interesting, right?

I’m not saying you need to put a whole lot of focus and time into them, but a yearly refresh never hurts. Try updating them every so often to keep your account looking updated, modern, fresh, and new.