Straight From The Source

Pinterest emailed me this past week and I got pretty excited. I like to pretend Pinterest and I are tight since I basically live and breathe it, but since they are kind of busy over there… let’s sum up these automated responses because I still found it helpful to learn what Pinterest is wanting from its content creators. ⁠⁠

Pin This For Later:

Fresh Pins: They Want You To Use New URL’s and Blog Posts

The more consistent you are about creating new, high quality blog posts, the more likely you are to get better distribution on Pinterest. Repins aren’t nearly as helpful** as you sharing something new from your claimed site OR creating something on Pinterest (aka Idea Pins).

**If you’re brand new to Pinterest or rarely publish content, I do recommend the occasional repin that is very niche-specific to tell Pinterest algorithm who to send your way.

Experiment: They really want you to play with different features

They want you sharing video pins, story pins, AND static pins. Even if the story pins don’t link. Even if the video pins can take longer. They want it all and they’ll reward you if you do.

Listen, I get that my team and I spend a disproportionate amount of time on Pinterest, and you don’t want to get on our level. Here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be all the types perfectly or all the time. I recommend doing at least 1 video + story pin/week and putting your total pins/day down to accommodate the time it takes to add that into your routine.

Idea Pins, Idea Pins, Idea Pins

Reminder that these aren’t like Instagram Stories. Idea Pins last forever, can be made from repurposed content and do have a call to action at the end: to have that user follow you. While followers on Pinterest doesn’t affect your business goals right away, it can be helpful for increasing impressions on future pins you post that DO have links. It puts you in good standing with Pinterest and tells them that you have useful content.

Outbound clicks, saves, even impressions > followers BUT we’ll take what we can get.

Tailwind is still cool

I’ve been noticing a bit of difference between manual pins AND tailwind sent pins, but it’s sooo hard to track apples to apples. When it’s a fresh pin (new URL to Pinterest or new image to old URL on Pinterest), that is always going to get the most initial love from Pinterest.

What I’ve been trying lately is pinning the first pin to a new piece of content manually on Pinterest to its most relevant board and then using Tailwind to schedule to all other relevant boards and to schedule other new images out.

Again, done is better than perfect so take this as a sign to stick with Tailwind if that’s all the time you have available.

Keywords still matter

The #1 thing people do wrong on Pinterest is not use keywords and it’s also the #1 way people can find your pin because it tells the algorithm what your pin is about and which search terms this pin should be found under.

Both your Pin title and description should include these.

More Helpful Links:

• 3 Common Mistakes Bloggers Are Making With Their Pinterest Profiles
• 4 Key Things Bloggers Need To Add In Their Pins
• How To Create A Good Pin
• Get your first month of Tailwind free here!