The best Pinterest practices for bloggers

 

Pinterest recently announced changes to their best pinning practices and luckily Tailwind, the Pinterest scheduling tool were on hand to break the news and explain how things will change. Tailwind also unveiled a new feature to help you with the best practices. So what has changed in the world of Pinterest and how can you follow the new best practices?

 

Pinterest is valuing fresh content above everything else now. Duplicate content won’t be pushed out as much and if there’s too much duplicate content your account could be suspended. Pinterest is wanting to keep things fresh and what users respond to most is new content. I’m afraid that does mean there is now more work for bloggers. Where it was once recommended by many a Pinterest guide to create a lot of boards and pin one pin to multiple relevant boards this is no longer the case. One pin could potentially be pinned to 20 different boards so if you were using Tailwind you scheduling queue would fill up very quickly and easily. Well that is duplicate content and Pinterest algorithms are no longer placing value on duplicate content. It’s now recommended that one pin is only pinned to a very small number of highly relevant boards. That does mean content creators will now have to make more pins than they have previously to ensure what they’re pinning is fresh. 

 

Will my account be penalised if others share my content, surely that’s also a duplicate? No, Pinterest has been very clear on this. Your account will not receive penalties or suspension for people sharing your content. That’s what Pinterest is all about and that’s what they’re trying to encourage more of with these changes. They know users love and respond better to fresh content so by encouraging you to pin fresh content Pinterest are hoping you’ll reap the benefits. 

 

Pinterest are now defining fresh content as pins that have a different image or text on them. I’ll be honest, I was already making sure that each pin I created had a different background image but Pinterest are being very clear that this is the number one thing that will define your content as fresh. You can still have multiple pins that all link back to the same blog post though so it’s still recommended to make multiple pins for each blog post you write. Just make sure each pin has a different image. Pinterest are wanting the focus to be on creation not curation so while you should still absolutely be sharing and saving other peoples content you need to make sure that what you’re saving is highly relevant to your board and your audience and creating more of your own fresh content over saving others.

Unfortunately Pinterest and Tailwind don’t really provide numbers. There’s no magic answer and if they provided specific rules and numbers it would be easy for people to cheat the system. As I’ve mentioned it was once recommended that you have quite a lot of boards so you could pin one pin to multiple boards. As this is no longer the case I would advise you create a core of strong, relevant and highly engaging boards, think quality over quantity. Whilst it’s usually not recommended to delete boards and pins I think personally with these new changes I will be taking a good look at my Pinterest stats and maybe removing the boards that don’t perform well which will allow me to focus on creating fresh content for my most engaged boards.

 

As for how many times you should pin each day, again there is no magic number. However Tailwind have said the most successful accounts pin between 15-25 times a day. This is quite a significant reduction in the number of pins a lot of Pinterest guides or gurus used to recommend. Pinterest users were recommended to pin up to 50 times a day with the belief that the more of your content you put of there the better it would be for you. However again much like the number of boards the focus has now moved to quality over quantity. Pinterest will place more value on a small number of fresh, SEO friendly pins than it will a large number of duplicate, poor quality pins.

 

In all honesty if you don’t have Tailwind and you follow the above new practices you’ll be fine. However for those of you who do have Tailwind they’ve introduced a new feature called the SmartGuide. This feature is available for all Tailwind users at no extra cost and ensures you’re adhering to the best practices on Pinterest. As best practices change, the SmartGuide will keep you on track with real time updates. The aim is that eventually the SmartGuide will guide users towards the positive rather than protecting them against the negative which will ultimately help you grow. The SmartGuide can monitor your schedule to make sure you’re pinning the right amount and that you’re pinning fresh content rather than too much duplicate content. It also monitors the SmartLoop feature again to prevent too much duplicate content. 

 

With these new changes I’m not expecting to see results over night. I’ve always said that cracking Pinterest takes a lot of time. I’ve only being using Tailwind and Pinterest properly since the start of December and my current strategy adhered to all the old rules which means I need to overhaul everything as well as create more fresh content than I’ve ever had to do before. I’m interested to see my stats in a few months time though and see how things have changed.

 

How do you feel about the new Pinterest practices? Will they make more work for you? Let me know in the comments. 

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