← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E12 Is Keeping an Eye on Other Pinterest Accounts in My Niche Worth the Time?
00:37:46
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- [00:02]
A
Hey, welcome to pentalk, the Gozew podcast for all things Pinterest for bloggers and content creators. I'm Tony Ho and with me is my co host, Carly Campbell. So what are we talking about today, Carly?
- [00:12]
B
We are going to talk about if there is a lot of value in keeping an eye on other Pinterest accounts in your niche.
- [00:20]
A
Yeah. So I came up with this topic because this was something that I spent a lot of time on when I was creating a lot of content for Google. There are lots of tools out there to keep an eye on your competitors, and that's, that's what I call them. But also it can be a pretty brutal competition in that there's only one website that can rank number one on Google for a keyword. So everyone's goal is to be that number one ranking site and that's where you're going to get majority of your traffic. Pinterest is a little bit different. I think we've talked about this on some episodes. It's not like a zero sum game in that yes, you could rank number one on Pinterest, search for a keyword, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get all the traffic because of how users engage with it. It might not be exactly the same as Google. And also those rankings can fluctuate and change so much because Pinterest is wanting to show a lot of fresh, unique ideas on the search results, whereas Google, not so much. They will make big changes and shuffles to the rankings when they run their big core update algorithms, you know, and some other different algorithms, and then things will shift a lot. But otherwise it's kind of the same rankings day in, day out. And so it's just a different animal in my opinion. But yeah, I wonder, you know, switching over to Pinterest, focusing more time over there, I can't help but bring that particular way of approaching my process of creating content or even niche selection. And I'm sure other people are too. You've been spending more time on Pinterest, like really dedicated to it more than me. Has this been something that you've done and do you see a lot of other people doing it prior to the big, you know, Google updates that have taken out a lot of bloggers and has shifted a lot of them over to Pinterest Starting in 2024?
- [02:14]
B
That's a hard question to answer because I think I would be crazy to say that like, like, no, I never look at other Pinterest accounts. I never look to see what they're doing that's not true. Even if I don't go to those accounts and spend time looking at them, I'm still very aware of their content and how Pinterest is treating it. Because I'm always on Pinterest doing research on Pinterest, seeing other people's pins in the feed, noticing what Pinterest is serving up to me, even though I always frame what I'm talking about as though I'm looking on Pinterest. I mean, part of that is also seeing what other people are doing on Pinterest. That said, unlike the Google competitor analysis approach that SEO focused creators take, I have never taken a competitor analysis approach to Pinterest because A, I believe that unique ideas will always outperform on Pinterest. So. So if I'm going to look at a competitor for anything, it's going to be to see if they haven't covered this yet. And if they haven't covered this yet, then that's going to be something I'm going to want to cover. And B, I mean, Pinterest is a little bit like a rising tide lifts all boats. Not entirely. There's still winners and losers. But if I've got a competitor that has a wildly popular pin, you know, I'm seeing it everywhere on Pinterest. When I look, I don't look at that and think, oh, I need to replicate that pin. I think, oh, I need to come up with the next idea that the user's gonna engage with after they engage with this idea. Because that pin's already doing well and my piggybacking off their success doesn't look like creating the same pin and beating them out. Because you said it yourself, the rankings fluctuate so fast. Taking the top spot for ranking is only a short term benefit. The short term benefit is that Pinterest tests your content faster, I think, and get some engagement faster. But the real place that I want to be is in the home feed. And even if I never rank, if I can create relationship between the top ranking pins, you know, and my pins, then after they engage with my competitor's pin, my competitor, you know, people call them a competitor, but really I love the fact that their pins are doing so well, I'm going to save them to my boards, they're going to have relationship with my pins and when people engage with those pins that are already doing well, hopefully they'll engage with my pins next. And so I never look at other accounts and think this is doing so well for them. Now I need to do That I think, you know, I'm gonna work with this idea that's doing well and work on it for myself. And I do notice, like, what their design is like, and I notice the good aspects of it. Like, these are really tightly cropped, bright images. Okay. And they're doing well, so I'm not gonna overlook that. But if my images aren't exactly the same, that's not a problem. I just want similar positive aspects. Does that make sense?
- [05:31]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. I have a different approach. Yeah, maybe.
- [05:36]
B
Right.
- [05:36]
A
The almost opposite. Right. Because. Okay, so some of my niches, like, they're very trend oriented, and sometimes there are trends that I miss, but my competitors catch. Right. And I want to ride their wave. And so they will help me find topics that I didn't find myself. And I can go after those because eventually their pins will die and they won't reach everyone. They might. They probably won't reach everyone. And so it gives me a chance to create something very similar and reach the people that they didn't reach their first time around. Maybe I can create something that's a little bit better in the sense that people will engage with that pen more with how I've done it versus how my competitors have done it.
- [06:21]
B
Yeah. I wouldn't say that. There's never an opportunity to do it better. There's opportunities to do it better, for sure. I don't ever want to be the one that's always chasing the trends. Sometimes I want to be the one to set the trend.
- [06:35]
A
Sure. Yeah. And I think a lot of things that we're talking about here you would agree with. But I think where we differ is, is this worth my time to focus on this? Because for you, it's. You're primarily a solo creator. You have someone helping you out a little bit on your Pinterest accounts. But there's a lot of people who are also solo creators, and so they really have to manage their time versus me. And there are other people like me, who have a team. Right. Of people that can help and multiple accounts. And so we have a little bit more luxury with time where we can kind of do all the things, basically.
- [07:11]
B
Absolutely. A time is a huge consideration in everything that I do. I do have help on my accounts, but I did them a hundred percent by myself for, like, seven years. So I. I completely default to. There's no time. And. And even now with help, like, I mean, there's so much work that I could have three times as much help, and we still wouldn't be accomplishing all the work. So I'm still picky and choosy about what we do. I don't want three times more help. Yeah, I don't.
- [07:43]
A
It's okay.
- [07:43]
B
I don't need it. Yeah.
- [07:45]
A
Then there's also the factor of the type of content. Is this evergreen content? Is this trend oriented content? So for example, if you've got a piece of content on, I don't know, you know, 10 ways to get your dog to stay in their bed when you have visitors come. Right. Keep them from jumping something along those lines. That's something I'm currently working with my dog on. So that's why it's top of mind. And you know, 10, I mean there might be some more ones, but there's like generally kind of a couple of tried and true. That will always work for dogs. There's not a lot of new ideas. Fresh ideas.
- [08:28]
B
Sure.
- [08:29]
A
For something like that. And so if you have, say your competitor has five ideas and you can squeeze out like two more than your competitors, so you've got seven, like, is it worth creating basically the same piece of content but you add two extra ideas?
- [08:43]
B
That's a very googly question.
- [08:46]
A
A googly question.
- [08:47]
B
It's very googly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it might be. I think that if I was to make a list of my Pinterest successes and failures, it would be an interesting experiment. I think more often than not my Pinterest failures would be the posts that meet that criteria. The ones where I'm like, oh, this is doing well for that person, so I'm gonna do it and do it better. But the fact of the matter is it was doing well for that person and I just was chasing something that wasn't available as a keyword right now or I mean, I don't know if that's how it works.
- [09:28]
A
And for some of those topics, you only need that idea once, like training my dog. Once it's done, then it's no longer top of mind for me that I need more ideas on that particular thing.
- [09:39]
B
Okay. You mean for the user?
- [09:40]
A
For the user, yeah, yeah, for the user. So it's really truly is like more of an evergreen. And if someone is already doing a great job on that, unless there's like something really unique, that's where a lot of these evergreen pens can do so well for you year after year. Maybe you were one of the first ones to really go after that particular topic and presented some great evergreen ideas. And that's what works well for the majority of Pinterest users. So why reinvent the wheel. Yeah, in a sense, yeah.
- [10:09]
B
Well, I mean, I think that. No, you should reinvent the. Well, not reinvent the wheel. Reinvent something new. Reinvent something that's not even real. Because if you can be the one that brings the unique idea. And I say this as a person who's had a public site that I've used as a Pinterest example for years and years and years and years, everything that I publish gets copied within a few weeks, and not by one person, but by 150. And I would say that some people do it a little bit better than I had done it. And they, you know, they take those spots, they get the traffic. They do well. But. But I'd say the vast majority of those people are people that come to me a year later and say, why isn't this doing well? And very often the answer is because this is done. Put out a new idea. You'll need a new idea. And once you break into that new idea corner of Pinterest, because of the way Pinterest works, that will open up another hundred new ideas. Cause there's always a relationship to the next thing. So I. I find that I don't spend a lot of time looking at what other people are putting out. Not a lot. A little bit. I'd be crazy to say. I never look.
- [11:24]
A
Yeah.
- [11:25]
B
Yeah.
- [11:25]
A
Okay. In the past, though, it required. I say in the past because there's been some newer updates to making this easier, but in the past it required a little bit more intentionality, a little bit more work.
- [11:35]
B
Yeah.
- [11:36]
A
To try to look at your. To first find the competition. There are different approaches for that. One of the ways I like to do it is I will go to Pinterest search and there's a filter to just search accounts and that search there. It's searching, like their Pinterest username and description and it's looking for keyword matches. Right. So if you're in home decor, you can just type in the word home, or you can do home decor, if you want to get more specific. And it will search and show profiles of users who are in the home decor niche. And then I'm paying attention to ones initially. You'll. You'll see that list and it shows, like, the number of followers they have.
- [12:14]
B
Yeah.
- [12:15]
A
Which we've talked about. Doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to get a ton of traffic, although I think there's a case for high correlation between someone who's got like a million followers and they're probably getting quite a bit of Traffic from Pinterest, if they're.
- [12:27]
B
Still doing a good job with their Pinterest.
- [12:28]
A
Yeah, that's true.
- [12:28]
B
Yeah. Yeah. If the account is still being pinned to actively.
- [12:31]
A
I built my own tool. It's currently just a private tool right now, but one day I will probably publicly release one, like with pin clicks. And that is I can put in a keyword and it will search Pinterest and all the accounts. And instead of just looking at the followers, it's looking at, like, their monthly views on their account. And it all goes into a spreadsheet and I can sort it by monthly views. So I can instantly start seeing the top accounts for niche. Right. And so from there, I'm going to go look at their boards, their pens again, looking for stuff that I've missed.
- [13:07]
B
Do you know what I'm gonna look for? I'm gonna look for the stuff that they missed. I'm gonna open up all their ranking pins that look like really good search volume, and I'm gonna see where the pins don't match the search intent or the pins where the pins aren't doing a good job of targeting.
- [13:25]
A
Yeah.
- [13:25]
B
Because I know for a fact right now that I've got Thanksgiving pins ranking for the summer variation of a keyword that to me says, that's a wide open word. I can't wait to do this on other people's accounts. This is something I will look at my competitor accounts for.
- [13:42]
A
Okay. All right.
- [13:43]
B
I want to know where their pins are. Missing the mark and ranking.
- [13:47]
A
Interesting. Yeah. So like with this new feature we launched with pin clicks, the Account Explorer, you can put it in any Pinterest account and it will show you all of their pins and it'll be sorted by number of saves, but it'll also show you the keywords that they rank for. And so in my case, I'm looking at. Okay, what are some really popular keywords that they're covering that I'm not?
- [14:08]
B
Right.
- [14:09]
A
But in your case, you can be looking at. Okay, I'm seeing that they're ranking for these keywords, and the keyword really doesn't totally match the intent.
- [14:17]
B
Yeah. Because I know they exist because I've got them on my account. That's how I'm seeing that in my. Cause I know they exist. So you're going to look for the gaps in your content. I want to look for the gaps in theirs.
- [14:27]
A
Yeah.
- [14:27]
B
And I think there's. We could find the gaps and fill them all up.
- [14:29]
A
I know, right? I think both approaches are great.
- [14:33]
B
Yeah, definitely.
- [14:34]
A
Yeah. Yours Seems just an extra step, right? Like you gotta. You gotta go and. Well, you gotta really understand the intent, which we've talked about previous episode.
- [14:48]
B
That's right.
- [14:48]
A
So that's really important to understand. And that just requires, in my opinion, a lot of time and really knowing your niche for that. And that is hard to teach. So, like, with my team, I have a lot of people from the Philippines, and even if they're not from the Philippines, it just takes time to really teach them to understand the niche. And so that just makes things a little more challenging for me when it comes to training. I can't lean on my team for their intuition based on lots of experience with the platform and lots of experience with the niche. So I have to kind of come up with this middle ground of a procedure they can follow where it can lead to a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but requires less intuition. And that this is. So that's where I'm looking at the keywords, right at the pins that my competitors are already doing. It's proven. Whereas, like, to train someone to see the gaps would be tricky. I'm not saying it's not possible.
- [15:47]
B
I think it would be tricky.
- [15:49]
A
Yeah.
- [15:49]
B
Yeah, I'm gonna do it myself. Yeah, Yeah, I like it. I actually, I was doing this already to a lesser extent on my account with the. The Account Explorer tool in pink clicks. I like to put my accounts in. So I know, I know probably a lot of people use it to look at their competitors, but I like to use it to look at mine because I like the path of least resistance to work with what's working. If I can see that there's already keywords that are doing well for my account that I hadn't realized that I was ranking for yet. That's been really eye opening for me to go like, oh, look, I'm already ranking for this. I need to make more pins for that. Because one good pin leads to another on Pinterest, right? That's how it works. So make, make more pins for things that are already doing well and start looking at those keywords and where the relationship is, you know, between that keyword and other keywords that I can start working in on that relationship. And so I've been using the Account Explorer tool to really look at my account, but now I can definitely see and I can find these gaps on my own account too. Now that I was listening to you explain this about the one that you're using, the different tool, the tool you're using is a little different than the account Explorer tool. But. But I can come up with examples where I've seen in my own content the wrong pin ranking for a good keyword, but that tells me Pinterest likes my account for that or there's not another good pin out there for that. So I'm gonna fill those gaps and that's really. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.
- [17:23]
A
And you're going to ignore search volume when you do that?
- [17:27]
B
If I think the keyword's good. Yeah, if I think the keyword is good. But I feel like that is a cop out of an answer because it's a. It's. If my intuition thinks it good, then yes. Yeah, I mean, I see it. So it's hard to completely ignore. Yeah, I am. And actually in the scenario that I'm thinking of right now on this specific example that I'm thinking of on my account, it makes sense that the search volume is low right now.
- [17:53]
A
Okay. Like, yeah, could be seasonal related.
- [17:56]
B
It's a seasonal keyword. Yeah, it's a seasonal keyword. But the season's long. It's going to be a good. It's going to be a good keyword. But the search volume right now I bet, is nothing. I'd have to check it. Nobody would be searching for this right now. But one of my pins from the wrong season is ranking there and the fact that it'll have 21 for search volume will not faze me. I'll let you know how it goes.
- [18:18]
A
Yeah, I know I put you on the spot with that, but I do. Search volume is kind of new.
- [18:21]
B
It is so new and it's so hard.
- [18:23]
A
Yeah, we're still kind of figuring this out as we go along.
- [18:27]
B
When you do competitor analysis, are you gonna do it based on search volume? Is that gonna be the deciding factor when you're looking at your competitors accounts.
- [18:35]
A
And trying to decide when I'm looking at keywords.
- [18:37]
B
Yeah.
- [18:38]
A
Yeah.
- [18:38]
B
Okay.
- [18:39]
A
That's helping me decide what to focus on first. Because for me, I think I mentioned this on the episode about search volume is that higher search volume means potential to initially reach a wider audience. And so if I can do that, my theory is I gain more traction and then I can throw some new pins, new topics that are related like onto that same board and reach those same people.
- [19:07]
B
So I do think that a board for high search volume keywords might be a really good strategy. I and I did start this week creating a couple new boards.
- [19:15]
A
Yeah.
- [19:15]
B
For high search volume keywords because I want all the pins on that board to be for that keyword.
- [19:23]
A
So I don't know if I pointed this out already, but one of the things that we had talked about was that when it comes to this, keep an eye on your competitors. I will look at things at the account level, but you're more focused on the topic level of what they're covering. So I want to first find all these accounts. I want to see which one's the biggest. I want to see the boards that they are consistently pinning to. That's revealing to me that those are good pins. A caveat to this is, like with other tools, including pin clicks, you're just seeing saves for each pin. And saves doesn't always mean clicks, as we've talked about. And so there is a risk there and that you could be recreating pins that just give your competitors a lot of saves, but not a lot of clicks. You don't really know at the end of the day because there's just no way for you to see that click data. Exactly. From Pinterest. So you're kind of guessing, but it's something like, we have to go off something. So I can, you know, train my team and get them to choose because they're choosing keywords for me. Okay, I'm not choosing my keywords. They're doing. I've trained them to do keyword research. So I just had to be very clear with repeatable, step by step instructions that I can hire someone tomorrow. If my team member left, I can hire a new person and they can go right into that role and be able to do secure research.
- [20:49]
B
Well, you can look at the pins and ask yourself a little bit. To a certain extent you can ask yourself, does this ping get clicks or saves? And nine times out of 10, I think that you can determine the answer. You know, if the image is just an image, we know that those tend to get more safes. And if the image has text overlay or prompts a question, if you can define the reason that the user would click, then very often we know that they're pits a good clicks.
- [21:19]
A
Yeah. And that really comes down to understanding user intent. Right. What we talked about last episode and knowing. Knowing the kind of topics that people will click on and engage with because they need more information. It's more than just that one idea that's presented on the pen itself. It's not standalone. They're going to have to click on it to get more information.
- [21:41]
B
That's right. And even some of the standalone image, once you get them out there, they can be seen by Such a vast amount of people that they can begin to generate a good number of clicks. So as you learn your niche, when you look at competitor pins and you see, you know, oh, this one has 125,000 saves, and it doesn't look like a clickable image, but if you've got a couple of those two that are similar, you might be able to translate that into save information in your head. I know what my plain image, like this one gets with a similar amount of saves.
- [22:21]
A
Yeah.
- [22:22]
B
So you'll be able to guess that if you've got good experience in the niche.
- [22:27]
A
One of the other things that I'm wanting to look at, it's really difficult to do right now, and that is I want to understand the pinning frequency of my competitors.
- [22:38]
B
Okay.
- [22:38]
A
Because. Well, have we talked about this frequency? It can be very niche dependent.
- [22:43]
B
Yeah.
- [22:44]
A
And so it's like a number one question. People are asking, like, how many pens per day are you doing? And it's hard to give everybody the same answer. But I would. I'm really curious to know what my competitors are doing. I'm not aware of any tool that will let you look at that, but that's something that I want to build in Penclicks.
- [23:03]
B
That would be neat.
- [23:04]
A
Other than you can go and manually, like, spot check their pens, that's just. You can do it. It's just time consuming.
- [23:11]
B
I have done that.
- [23:12]
A
Yeah.
- [23:12]
B
Okay. When I say I don't look at my competitors, like, regularly when I'm. I mean, like, I haven't regularly looked at competitors when I'm planning pins or planning content. But over the years, especially when I was trying to reverse engineer Pinterest in general, I spent a lot of time looking at my competitors to see how much they were pinning and how they were pinning and how many boards did they have and when were they starting new boards and what group boards were they on and were they using group boards and what did they call their boards and what did the people who saved their pins call their boards?
- [23:48]
A
So that's a good one.
- [23:49]
B
I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at other accounts that way. And actually you can use pin clicks already to determine pinning frequency if you're really diligent about it. If you just put the URLs into the pinstats tool, you can, you can determine, like, how often an account is pinning. And I've looked at a few accounts that way, mostly to experiment with the tool and see if it would work, and it does.
- [24:13]
A
Okay.
- [24:14]
B
And I had a very specific question about how often an account was pinning and when they had started the board they were pinning to. And Pincliks was able to answer that with the pinstats tool for me, which is really cool.
- [24:25]
A
That's cool. Yeah. So there's definitely a case for when you enter into a new niche, spending some time initially finding other accounts in that niche. So look at those particular things. That's one part of this conversation, and I guess the other part is like, figuring out, is it worthwhile to keep an eye on these accounts and continue to look at that information, and is it worth your time in doing so?
- [24:51]
B
Well, I think that my gap thing is going to be worthwhile forever because Pinterest is always adding new annotations, and there's always going to be new opportunities where they are having to fill in the gaps on their platform with old pins until the new ones are made for these words that don't even exist today as annotations on Pinterest, but they will in a year. So I think there's an ongoing case for that. I mean, for the rest of my content where I'm not filling in gaps. I don't regularly look at my competitors now to see what I should be writing. I just want to write what I want to write and what Pinterest tells me might be good to write.
- [25:35]
A
Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. So that's certainly a strategy that can work. The other area I want to spend more time looking at is not just their pending frequency, but also, I want to know, like, if a new pin is starting to take off, if it's getting a lot of saves.
- [25:54]
B
Yes, I want to know that, too.
- [25:56]
A
Okay, that's cool.
- [25:57]
B
That'll be fun.
- [25:58]
A
Yeah, that'll be fun again. That's another feature that I want to build with pin clicks. So you can follow accounts within pin clicks and you can get alerts for different things, such as, like, hey, there's a newer pin, and all of a sudden it's getting, like, 50 or 100 saves, and it's way outside the normal range for that account. I would want to know about that.
- [26:18]
B
Yeah, I think that'd be really cool to know. I mean, I don't think that the answer is as simple as, okay, well, then I'm gonna make content that targets that keyword or that looks like that. I don't think the answer is that simple, but it. It can help us ask more questions, like, how specific is this board that it's on? How specific is all the other content that is on the board with it? Like was the board brand new or was it, was it a five year old board? And these are the things that I think will be really cool to see when we can see that or like.
- [26:51]
A
How many where there are still a bunch of pins for that URL that they've already created. So it was, you know, existing URL, but all of a sudden they created a fresh pin for that URL and it's taken off. Like there's all sorts of things.
- [27:04]
B
Oh yeah, I think that'll be the case a lot of the time or I mean, I think we'd see that happen a lot. They had other pins for this URL that were strong. They made a new one and then it did well too.
- [27:14]
A
Yeah, that's certainly something to pay attention to. I have been putting in lots of accounts into this new account Explorer tool and pin clicks and there have been some big ones and I was shocked at how many times they will repin the same pin. Like the first page of results is the same exact pin. Basically they just repinned it. And I've been going back and forth with my developer on should we hide those duplicates or not. And maybe if we do, I would still like to know, okay, this was repinned, you know, 20 times rather than seeing maybe it take up the top 20 results, you know, of their pens. I would still like to know that because I find it very interesting that for some accounts they won't repin like crazy all their pens, but there are some that they do and that tells me there's something special about those pins that they took the time to repin them.
- [28:07]
B
Yeah, yeah, I, I mean I haven't repinned in years and years. It is something that has come up in conversation a number of times lately. People have said to me something similar to this like you know, I'll every pin to X amount of boards or whatever after and I would like to find a way to measure the ROI of that. I always kind of default to like, okay, well they did that but we don't know if that increases distribution at all. We don't know if they would have had the same distribution on it if they hadn't repinned it or not. And I would really like to find a way to determine that.
- [28:44]
A
Yeah, especially if there is a pattern long term where like over the last two years there are certain pins that all of a sudden you see them repinning a bunch and they've consistently done that. So maybe that's telling on if it's worth their time or Not. But that's just hard to figure out.
- [29:02]
B
But do you think they can tell whether it's worth. They believe it.
- [29:05]
A
They believe it, right?
- [29:06]
B
They believe it.
- [29:07]
A
Yeah. It's just. It's just another data point to look at and, you know, formulating a strategy on if you want to emulate in some ways. So look for the people listening. I hope it doesn't come across it. I'm just advocating. Just copy all of your competitors.
- [29:24]
B
Oh, I don't think it does sound that way.
- [29:26]
A
And my hope is that with more competitors or creators entering into the platform and that are in the same niche, that there will just be a natural evolution of improving the content, increasing the value of the content that you're creating because you're trying to one up each other in some ways. I'm, you know, I'm a big fan of, you know, the free market in that way. And I mean, even like, if you were to run a local business or if I were to run a local business like a dry cleaners, I would go visit all the other dry cleaners in town and I would go look and see, you know, how busy they are or lack of and how they have things set up, how they operate in their business and take some of their. Their really good ideas. Like, I feel like I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn't pay attention to what they were doing and what's working well for them for my own advantage. So, you know, and that doesn't mean I'm taking away their business because I could have my dry cleaner on a different side of town and it's just reaching a different market. It might be people who now maybe they're in a position where they need to. They need a dry cleaner and now there's one closer to them. And so it's just convenient. But I don't know. That's the way I look at it is I just hope that we just continue to see competitors come in. And it's like, okay, it's a little scary, but it's gonna push me to try new things and fill in my gaps and whatever those gaps look like and not just complain. I mean, I'm seeing a lot of competitors in my own spaces, you know, last year, 2024 especially. So, yeah, it's just motivated me to, like, really think outside the box in some ways and try some new ideas. But it's inevitable. Competition is inevitable.
- [31:12]
B
Yeah. I don't think I said it in this episode yet. I think maybe I said it before we started Recording. But the truth is that in successful business, the businesses that, that are successful are the ones that innovate. They are the ones that have ideas. They are the ones that do things a little bit outside the box, a little bit different, a little bit better. It's unlikely that you would create a long term successful business just carbon copying somebody else's business. And so I don't think that's what you're suggesting doing. And I'm sure that other people understand that too, because I think one of the reasons that you have a wildly successful business is, is because you do, you know, see what other people are doing and then think outside the box and not replicate exactly what you're seeing. There was a really interesting thread that I read in a group the last week about digital courses and how they don't really provide a ton of value. They can't, because the person who's taking them is incapable of duplicating the results. It's a good thread. Did you see that one? Yeah, there's a lot of great points in it. But digital courses, and I'm not saying this because I sell a digital course or because you sell a digital course. This is because I firmly believe this, whenever I take one, I don't take the course and think, now I have to go out and I have to do this step by step. The way that I saw it demonstrated in the course. I take the course and I, I'm always thinking to myself, what is this person's thought process while they're putting this together? What is, what is the magic sauce that they have that they're doing it? And then I take that pile of thoughts, that pile of realizations, and I go like, now I'm not gonna put my business in the box of this course. I'm gonna take the valuable pieces and see how they fit into my business. And I think it's the same when we look at our competitors. We can, I called it filling in the gaps or whatever. But whether it's, it's just taking inspiration about the things that are working, about the things that you might be doing better than you're doing, but that doesn't mean that you need to do it the same. I don't think that we have to live in a, in this like dog eat dog space. If we are all, if we are all applying our own personalities and approaches to our businesses, then they won't be. Nobody can copy the thing that I do because I'm doing it actively, differently than they're doing. They, I mean, people Copy it. They put it out there, but they don't create the same thing that I have. So I don't even worry about the people who copy me.
- [33:59]
A
Wow. Okay. You don't.
- [34:01]
B
Not really. Like, I know people do it, but I don't go back there and watch them and fixate on that because they're going to. I mean, I think I feel frustrated, like, oh, I wish they weren't doing that. But, like, I know that I'm going to come up with my own new idea. I'm going to put my own new idea out there, and that idea is going to do well independently of if somebody else is copying. So I don't know. I just. I don't think that. That we have to approach competitor research from the attitude of, like, oh, we're trying to copy people. And I don't think that's what you're saying when you say it's cool.
- [34:35]
A
Yeah. Because sometimes there's certainly an advantage of all of your competitors are going left, then try going right and doing something very different than what they're doing. That's something I'm. I'm implementing right now. We've got that off the ground with one of my accounts. That's where I've got, like, one eye on my competition, but the other eye is looking at, okay, how can I generate something unique and introduce that into the platform that my competitors aren't? But it's still good to know if there are topics, especially at the board level, that I have not covered, my competitors are, or some big ones, or even maybe some ones that I thought were too small and I didn't give them a time of day. Maybe I was focused on search volume, you know, but all of a sudden. And I've seen this for sure, and we've both seen this with our own eyes. Maybe we talked about it on previous episode, but we found a keyword with very, very low search volume. But you look at the number of saves for the pins. This is on an idea page.
- [35:36]
B
Yeah.
- [35:36]
A
Yeah. So I think we did talk about an example of that for the search volume episode.
- [35:41]
B
And I think that it's important to remember the thing you said about Pinterest search not being a zero sum game. And, you know, if you've got a competitor that's ranking for a strong keyword and you rank also, your pins are just in relationship with those strong pins. I consider it relationship, not competition.
- [36:03]
A
Yeah. Okay. I can get behind that. So, you know, to answer the question, is keeping an eye on other Pinterest accounts worth the time. I think we're saying yes. We're both saying yes, but in different ways. It just depends on how you approach it with those gaps that we talked about. Right. Gaps in your own content, also with your competitors. And it's finding those opportunities. And so if there's a way you can make that at least a monthly practice, if not quarterly practice of paying attention. And there's new accounts entering Pinterest every day that are targeting different topics. And so not forgetting about that, not forgetting to every once in a while do a search on Pinterest and use that filter option to look at accounts. And hopefully soon enough we'll have a tool that will make it easier to find all those accounts. Because the search results for Pinterest for that particular search is not great. I don't like it.
- [37:01]
B
For profiles.
- [37:02]
A
For. Yeah, searching for profiles.
- [37:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I look forward to that. I think it'll be. It'll be fun and I'll use it for filling in all my gaps.
- [37:11]
A
There we go. All right. Well, I think that about covers it. Is it worth your time to keep an eye on your competitors? I'm curious to know. Let us know if you're in one of our communities or you can send us an email@pentalkpodcastmail.com hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pentalk. Head over to pentalkpodcast.com to get the show notes and the resources mentioned. And hey, if you like this episode and want to hear more from us, please rate and review our show. Thanks.