← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E16 Third Party Schedulers vs the Native Scheduler (Or “Manual”) Pinning
00:54:00
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- [00:03]
A
Hey, welcome to pintalk, the go to you podcast for all things Pinterest for bloggers and content creators. I'm Tony Hill 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 pinning with the native scheduler versus scheduling your pins in a third party scheduler. It has been a hot topic of conversation for as long as I have been pinning.
- [00:25]
A
Yeah, I would say so. For me, that's what I've seen a lot on my own forums and seen that in other Pinterest communities. Oh my gosh. There's a lot of back and forth with it and I don't know, on the surface it seems like kind of a boring topic for a podcast episode. I guess this is gonna be for those people who are really into Pinterest and want to get into the weeds. And we don't know on, on the onset here how long this episode will be. I guess you will know as a listener by the time it gets into your hands. But there are some things that we want to talk about and I think there's some important things for you to understand. We recognize that you may be currently using some sort of third party scheduler. So if you want to know what we're talking about, just go to Google, type in, you know, Pinterest scheduling tool, and you'll see a bunch of sites listed that offer tools for you to basically get all of your pins uploaded to their tool and they will put it over to Pinterest for you. So you might be using one of those tools or you might be considering it, or maybe you are using the Pinterest native scheduler. So they. Pinterest has created their own version of a way to schedule out your pens ahead of time. So you can just get them all created and uploaded in one sitting and then they will handle getting them out there published for you. Or I guess the third option is you're just flying by the seat of your pants and you're creating pens and then you're just going in there and like manually pinning them as you create them.
- [01:52]
B
Yeah, I think there's some people who do it that way, but more and more often I see people wanting to take, you know, a get ahead kind of approach for Pinterest.
- [02:04]
A
Yeah, there's definitely gonna be quite a few advantages of getting ahead and getting those things scheduled out. So we're gonna talk about those. And, you know, this might change where you stand and what you want to do with how you're gonna schedule your pins out. Um, and then I've got some new tools that we'll talk about that's gonna help. So keep listening for that. Now, to start with, Carly, what was your life like before using a scheduler?
- [02:34]
B
Well, originally, I was one of those flying by the seat of your pants people who was just creating pins and putting them on Pinterest. And I did that for about six months, nine months. And then I wanted to have some kind of way to get ahead, so I had a binder, like paper binder.
- [02:52]
A
Like a physical binder.
- [02:54]
B
Physical binder carried with me when I left the house because I would need. Wherever I was going, I knew that I was gonna have to stop and pin. Whatever I was doing would have to be stopped so I could pin. And I would need my binder with me. So inside this binder, I had a list of all the boards I was on that I was pinning to. It was over a hundred boards because, you know, I had my own and I had group boards, and I had a list of my blog posts. And the blog posts were color coordinated with the different color of pen. And then I would write the date in that color of pen on the board that I pinned to. So I was keeping track of where the blog posts went to which boards daily. And I would pin twice a day. I did, like a morning, early afternoon pin, and then I did, like a late evening pin with my binder. And it was very, very successful. And my. The earliest, like, copies of my course had, like, pictures that I had taken of my binder to show people how I was doing it and stuff. But it really, like, Pinterest didn't have a scheduler at that time. And I did it for all the reasons that we're going to talk about, you know, later this episode. I wasn't using a third party scheduler. A big reason for me at the time was cost. So if cost is a consideration for anybody listening, you know, in whether or not they should be using a third party scheduler, like, I get that there was a season in my life where that wasn't a realistic thing for me to do, but there really was this. There really was this, like, interruption in my life, you know, with my binder at 7:00 every evening, no matter where I was, when I have to get out my binder and find an Internet connection so that I could make Pinterest work for me. But I definitely clearly remember that time in my life before, before there was any third party schedulers, before Pinterest had a scheduler. What about you? How did you do Pinterest before you could schedule it?
- [04:49]
A
Yeah, I just told my team to figure it out. I honestly don't know. Someone was in charge of Pinterest. It was kind of an afterthought, you know, and I just wasn't involved. So I think they did a bunch of manual pinning, for sure. I don't know. And I don't know how they kept it all organized.
- [05:05]
B
Maybe with a binder.
- [05:07]
A
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. That's pretty different. I've never heard that before. No.
- [05:13]
B
Yeah, the Internet at large made fun.
- [05:16]
A
Of me for it. So if, you know, eventually you got rid of the binder, right, and you started using something, what did you switch to? Or, you know, you don't have to name it specifically, but did you start using some sort of third party scheduler?
- [05:31]
B
Yes, I did. I tested, I tested a third party scheduler. I paid for it, which is the number one maybe disadvantage at that time for me. And I didn't really experience any crazy benefit to it. Things were fine. It was fine. My account was already very established at that point, and so there was already a lot of old pins that were doing well. So I was having a hard time comparing, like if it was better, if it was not better, but there was just no real benefit. And I never, like, fully committed to it. I never scheduled a hundred percent of my pins, so I don't have that experience to say, like, oh, I quit pinning completely on the platform and I started scheduling everything. I can't speak to that, but the pins that I scheduled, they didn't seem to do any better than the pins that I didn't schedule. You know, the ones that I pin manually. And right around the same time, Pinterest came out with their own native scheduler. And in my mind I was just like, if Pinterest is offering me an opportunity to schedule right on their platform, why would I use? Because I was already so tied to Pinterest, you know, showing up, pinning every day, twice a day, even just being allowed to pin out a couple days in advance was a massive change for me. So I went from manually pinning every day, twice a day, to using the Pinterest native scheduler in a pretty short period of time. So my experience with third party schedulers is pretty limited. We have been using a third party scheduler to pin on one of my accounts quite a lot for the last year. Because the native scheduler on Pinterest like, broke for me. I'm making air quotes for anybody who can't, who's not watching the video version. It turns out a year later that my scheduler wasn't actually broken, it was my computer. And getting a new computer solved that problem. But yeah, and embarrassing.
- [07:26]
A
You said it. I did.
- [07:28]
B
But because of that problem, we were forced to like, experiment with the third price schedule. It's gone. Fine. That account also hasn't experienced great growth. I'm not saying that's because of the scheduler or not. I'm just saying we certainly can't say, like, oh, I switched to a scheduler and I experienced great growth. I mean, my default is still the Pinterest native scheduler. How do you pin. What's your experience with third party schedulers?
- [07:53]
A
Okay, so hold on before I answer that for myself. Like we mentioned the beginning here. It's kind of a hot topic between using a third party scheduler or using a Pinterest native scheduler. Like, why is that?
- [08:06]
B
Okay, well, to quote the sales page for my course, which I can do, because this line has not changed in the eight or nine years that my course has been for sale. I say on there that I started researching how to make Pinterest easier. And I read hundreds of blog posts about what would make Pinterest easier, you know, better perform, you know, drive more traffic. And every single instructional blog post that I read was a sales pitch for some popular third party scheduler, you know, whichever one you want. And all of these sales pitches for the third party schedulers said I switched to, you know, third party scheduler A or third party scheduler B and my traffic exploded. They all said that now they all had the graphs to back it up. And it seems probable that they made the switch to the scheduler and their traffic exploded. But I already had really, really good Pinterest traffic at the time that I was doing that research and I started asking the questions, okay, well, did their traffic explode because they switched to a third party scheduler or did their traffic explode because they became more consistent in what they were doing on the platform? Which, remember, I was already killing it at consistency with my binder and my twice a day showing up to the platform, consistency wasn't what I needed help with. So being more consistent wasn't going to make my traffic better. But I do believe that being more consistent when the content that those people were already putting out was good. Being more consistent is only going to make your performance better. Attributing the success to the third party scheduler is not really fair because if you aren't putting out great content, being more consistent and not putting out great content isn't actually going to increase your traffic. At the same time that we read all these narratives of I switched to a third party scheduler and my traffic exploded, we have to also listen to the stories where I switched to a third party scheduler and my traffic just dwindled and dwindled and dwindled. And there are just as many of those as there are, you know, on the flip side. And so I believe that what really affects your traffic isn't necessarily the third party scheduler versus not the third party scheduler. It's the kind of content. It's so many more things. It's all the things that we talk about in all of our other episodes. But if you want to dig a layer deeper, I also have met lots of people who had really good content and they switched to a third party scheduler and their traffic didn't go up. So it's also not only consistency, it's a whole big complex picture. It's not just one piece of the puzzle. I just do believe that those narratives, the I switch to a third party scheduler and my traffic goes up. I believe that if we only focus on the third party scheduler piece of that picture, we're just, we're really kind of, oh, my goodness. You understand what I'm trying to say, but I can't say it.
- [11:27]
A
What is that called confirmation bias or like that?
- [11:33]
B
Like we are literally just closing our eyes to everything else. We're only focusing on the part of the story that. That it's good marketing. That's the part of the story they wanted us to focus on.
- [11:42]
A
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I gotcha. It makes sense. Okay. Yeah. And that's a lot of the conversations I've seen in different communities of just people posting screenshots or talking about traffic going up or down after switching.
- [11:55]
B
Yeah.
- [11:56]
A
And the same could be true for switching from a third party to the native Pinterest scheduler. And I think there's more to it that maybe they don't understand or that they haven't revealed. And again, every Pinterest account is like unique snowflake. Right? We've talked about that.
- [12:11]
B
Yes, that's right.
- [12:12]
A
So my experience with third party schedulers for a long time, you know, we were just using the Pinterest, you know, native scheduler or just manual pinning. And then we tested switching to a third party scheduler because of some of the advantages, and it didn't really do anything for us. Traffic didn't go up, it didn't go down. I'm trying to remember exactly why we stopped. It could have been costs, it could have been. We already had a good system in place. You know, let's just go back to what we were doing and that was it.
- [12:46]
B
Do you ever just worry about like, okay, well, this is fine, this is going fine. But you said, like, traffic didn't go up. Really, what you were doing was going fine before too. And because it's Pinterest, it's probably going to be safer than any change that that platform could make in the future that could retroactively affect the pins you had pinned. Like, could that have been part of it, why you made the decision to go back?
- [13:09]
A
Yeah, I, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, cause you're then relying now on someone else between your content and Pinterest and you know, so of course, like, I guess I'll say, like, I am biased towards using the native Pinterest scheduler and you are too. Yeah. But I think we both can agree that it's just true that we know people who are successful with Pinterest and they use a third party scheduler. So like, we're just not saying, like, don't ever use a third party scheduler. You can do great with it without it. That is just our preference to not use them. So we're not recommending them. Definitely, you know, consider them, check them out, see if it works for you. So there's just that little caveat to the rest of this conversation.
- [13:53]
B
That's right. And there are situations where, you know, at certain stages of your business, Maybe you're running six websites and unless you can afford six VAs to take care of six Pinterest accounts, that maybe it does make sense to be able to schedule out your pins a month in advance and then not come back to this Pinterest account again for a month. I mean, if you have five successful websites and you clearly know what you're doing on Pinterest and you want to start another one, don't let us tell you not to use a third party scheduler to start that one because, you know, those people obviously know what they're doing and that it's just fine. There's nothing inherently wrong that we can identify with third party schedulers.
- [14:37]
A
Maybe I'm teasing. Something that we'll cover. Okay, so what are the advantages? Let's talk about the advantages of using the third party schedulers.
- [14:46]
B
Okay. Well, there's this ability to schedule out far in advance. You know, the Pinterest native scheduler is limited to 100 pins scheduled at a time period. So whether or not you've scheduled a hundred pins over three days or 100 pins over five weeks, that's it. That's all you can have. And with the Pinterest native Scheduler, you can only schedule six weeks out. And that's actually a recent improvement. For the longest time, you could only schedule four weeks out. Yeah, the Pinterest native scheduler only allows you to schedule a pin every half hour. Like you can do one at 1 and 1:30 and 2 and 2:30, but you can't choose any other time slots. You don't need to give your Pinterest login pin to somebody else.
- [15:30]
A
Oh, I didn't. I didn't even think about that.
- [15:32]
B
Oh yeah. So that's the one that we're using on my one account that's one of the reasons is that she just logs in to the scheduler and she never logs into my own account.
- [15:41]
A
Right. Right.
- [15:42]
B
Now that does cause a real headache. When we want a new board. She like messages me and she's like, please create this board. And then I ignore her message for three days because I know she's got it and it's all under control. But that's actually something she wants done now. That's real, I think, frustrating for her, I'm sure. What are some of the other advantages?
- [16:00]
A
One of the advantages is just visually it's easier to keep up with your pins and when you've scheduled them if you just laid out on a calendar. So a lot of these third party schedulers do a good job with these calendar views. So there's that. And then now with AI and AI generation hitting the scene, a lot of these schedulers have implemented a way for you to generate your pin title description or even your images, really. You can go hog wild with some of these schedulers out there, but we're.
- [16:29]
B
Not saying you should do that.
- [16:30]
A
And yeah, that's right.
- [16:32]
B
So I personally think that. And we have a whole episode on this AI and Pinterest and I would really encourage everybody who's listening to go back and listen to that AI and Pinterest episode. But you know that I personally feel that AI text is much safer right now in the long run than AI images are. For me, I feel much more comfortable with it. And you are developing a new tool that helps with generation of description and title. And I have to say, I am really loving it. And you use it right in the Pinterest native scheduler. So that won't really be an advantage over the native schedule for very Long. Just, just putting that out there.
- [17:18]
A
That's true. And we've got a link to that tool in the show notes, if you're curious. It's the Pin Scriber tool. It's a new chrome extension that you can check out. Yeah, it's great for all of us who still use the native scheduler and you can just have it all generate right there inside Pinterest. So yeah, there's one that is maybe no longer an advantage with third party schedulers. One of the things that you talked about is like analytics. So there's a really popular third party scheduler that has some interesting analytics that they'll show you about your pins in your Pinterest account that I haven't seen. I haven't used this particular one in a long time. But you found when you did use it, like were they insightful?
- [18:00]
B
Yeah, there's actually been times in the past couple years where I, I've even considered getting an account just for the analytics just because I felt frustrated at the level of analytics that I can get with Pinterest. You know, you, you just can't go back far enough on Pinterest itself to really understand your long term data. And even though when you're in the weeds and you're growing a Pinterest account, sometimes it doesn't feel like that long term data matters very much. We're really interested in what's happening right now, but the long term data matters a lot. And what Pinterest offers for long term is real sad. So yeah, I've, I've considered getting accounts with third party scheduling tools just to have analytics recently. So I personally think that that's a major advantage to third party scheduling tools. You are also working on a tool to solve the analytics problem, right?
- [18:59]
A
Yeah, that's right. So I've created Pinner analytics and we'll have a link to that as well to help with this issue of not being able to see that long term data. And I always recommend that people export their analytics data.
- [19:14]
B
I've never done this.
- [19:15]
A
Oh my gosh.
- [19:16]
B
I know.
- [19:18]
A
But see the people who do, if they're anything like me, it just sits on their hard drive and they never open it up again.
- [19:24]
B
Okay.
- [19:24]
A
Yeah, they do it just because they know it's good. Probably back up your data because you will lose it. Like it starts at the six month mark. You start to lose a lot of your data out of the Pinterest analytics dashboard. Yeah. So I'm creating a tool that basically will let you have a place to store all that and then analyze it like long term so you can start to see trends over the years. Especially the seasonality stuff.
- [19:49]
B
Yes. Christmas versus Christmas. It's going to be amazing to be able to compare that. So I haven't gone ahead and gotten the third price scheduler to have the analytics, but I do believe that with the third party ones, the analytics will only go back as far as you've been using the tool. And so the analytics tool that you are creating will go back as far as Pinterest will allow you to collect the data. So for most of us, when we start using your tool, it'll be six months back, but that'll still be a lot further back than if you get a third party tool to start collect. I'm pretty confident about that anyway. Oh, I see the historical aspect of it.
- [20:31]
A
Yeah. Okay. But then once you start using Pinra analytics and consistently every month backing up your Pinterest data, then going forward you'll always retain all of your data for all time. You just have to get started.
- [20:46]
B
I am really excited.
- [20:47]
A
Did you see the little update I made so that it's like literally one click and it will take you directly to the report that you need to generate on Pinterest. Exactly. So it's just one click and it will preset your date to the previous month.
- [21:00]
B
No, I did it all before you did that.
- [21:03]
A
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you literally, you just, when you log in, you click the link and it will take you over to Pinterest Analytics. Your report is preset to what it needs to be and you just click the export button.
- [21:12]
B
Oh, I'm going to do it tomorrow because today's the 31st of March and my goal is to export my analytics. Well, this is the last time I'll do it myself actually. I'll be getting my VA to do it on the 1st of every month now going forward. So I'll use that tomorrow.
- [21:27]
A
There you go. Cool. Oh, and we added a little option to create a calendar subscription. With one click, you can add it to your Google Calendar Apple Calendar as a recurring reminder on the 1st of every month.
- [21:37]
B
Oh, that's great.
- [21:38]
A
There you go. All right. So those are the advantages.
- [21:43]
B
Yeah, I mean now that's not gonna be an advantage very much longer either.
- [21:45]
A
So I guess so. Now, what about the disadvantages of third party schedulers? We kind of mentioned one like personally we both had, and that was just cost.
- [21:56]
B
Yeah. When I started, I didn't have any extra money. Like, you know, you're already paying for hosting and you're already Paying for. At the time, I was paying for stock photos every day, but like tens of them. Cause I was creating that many pins and there was just no extra money for a scheduler.
- [22:13]
A
Yep. And I'd imagine the. With a lot of these schedulers, like if you maybe the other thing that was an issue for me, why it was so expensive is because you have to pay per seat. So per team member. Right. That you bring in, you have to pay an extra, you know, every month.
- [22:31]
B
Yeah.
- [22:32]
A
And so for me, having multiple team members, it just started to add up pretty quickly. And I create a lot of pins. And maybe there was that limitation too. It just gets more expensive all the way around. So there's costs, obviously anywhere from like $25 a month to $100 a month or higher. Probably depends on, you know, if you're using like the AI generation aspect of things. That can really add up. Right. One of the things that we, we talked about is like, I literally, when I was making notes, as we were discussing this outline for the episode, I just wrote this thing in the doc and then you said it and I was just laughing because I thought like you, because you said it a little bit differently, but pretty much the same thing. And I was like, I just wrote this down. What are you talking about? And you're like, oh, no, this is. This is what I want to talk about as well. And that is people who are using these third party schedulers, they're not going to log in to Pinterest as much. You know what I mean? Because they're kind of setting it and forgetting it externally using these schedulers. And I don't know, we both have an opinion and it's pretty much the same opinion. Why that could be a negative thing that you're not logging into your Pinterest account as much.
- [23:40]
B
Yeah. So I think you've said this on previous episodes. And you know this thing that Pinterest is looking for, signs of life. They know what real users look like on the platform versus what bots look like on the platformers. Bam. Accounts look like on the platform. And I've had this in my course ever since the first time the course came out. Pinterest is looking for real user interaction, real human interaction. And if you create a Pinterest account and never log into it again, that is literally like copy paste action from the Handbook of How to Be a Spammer. And Pinterest takes these signals and they use them to measure the quality of an account. I believe that it is very important to log into your Pinterest account and be active on your Pinterest account. And we talk all the time about like saving third party, strong third party pins that make sense on the board. We talk about saving them to the board. We see a lot of evidence that that's a really good way to start a board. But I mean, this could be baked into that too. To start a board and then go find those pins that are good quality pins and save them to the board, you need to be logging into the platform and finding those pins and saving them. And so even that is a sign that like this board is being created by a real user, not some piece of code that's written somewhere. That's how I view that. I feel like you have a similar opinion on it.
- [25:16]
A
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know looking underneath the hood and the code of Pinterest that they're tracking what you're doing as a creator. There's certain things that they're tracking. So I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised if they have some sort of, you know, spam algorithm that looks at user engagement from the creator side of things. If you've got like the Pinterest business account, there's someone in my community recently who, they had their account banned from Pinterest and they pretty much fell into this situation where they created an account and they did nothing but schedule out all their pins and they never logged in at all because they went on vacation and then like, you know, several more weeks went by. So it was a whole month or two, the initial life of this account and they never logged in beyond just initially setting up the account and then it was banned. That's just an anecdote. Right? There could have been a lot more factors to that as far as, like the pins. This person has created other successful accounts with Pinterest. So I didn't like doubt that they, it was because of bad pins that they were creating.
- [26:22]
B
Right. But that, that even just makes it more likely that the, you know, because they were on vacation, the accidental lack of engagement than the quality of the pins because they've proven that they can make good pins. So it just seems, you know, even more likely to me that it's the.
- [26:40]
A
Yeah. And I'm a believer that Pinterest is going to continue to up the dial on some of these things.
- [26:45]
B
Yeah.
- [26:46]
A
Because pins by spammers will continue to get better and better with the AI getting better and better.
- [26:54]
B
Good point.
- [26:55]
A
You know what I mean? And so at some point Pinterest is going to have to figure out how do we differentiate? Because we want to reward creators, we want to reward good sites. But if all the pins are amazing, how do they differentiate? And so looking at, well, who looks like a real person behind these pins.
- [27:16]
B
That'S a really great point. I believe that's completely likely when you put it that way, because their signals are going to need to come from somewhere.
- [27:24]
A
Yeah. So if you're using a third party scheduler, consider logging in more often. How often? I don't know, maybe a couple times a week at least. Think about it.
- [27:34]
B
Yeah, I, I'm creating a new account right now and I am actually we're doing a lot of experiments on the account. One that I'm very happy to share with everybody right now is something that I haven't done in years and years and years, and that is pinning third party pins from the home feed to my boards a couple times a week. So a couple times I'm sitting at the computer, I just open the account and I just scroll through the feed. I don't worry about what they're annotated with and I don't worry about who saved them originally. I just pin them like a real user would pin them.
- [28:04]
A
And yeah, so far so good, good idea.
- [28:08]
B
We have a couple more disadvantages to third party scheduling tools that we think people should be aware of. So I think that one of the, you know, most likely disadvantages in the future, even though we don't have really hard data for it right now, it's kind of related to what you just said about where is Pinterest going to look in the future for, for signs and signals. But if there is any particular third party scheduler that a lot of spammer accounts have used to create pins, Pinterest is going to know that that tool is the first choice of spammers. And there's a good chance that they could correlate that tool with spammers and then, you know, by relationship your account with spammers in the future. It's just one of those things that, you know, kind of like I said near the beginning, like when I didn't see a ton of results from the third party scheduler, I just thought like, well, why take the chance that in the future this could be a negative when I could just play it safe right now and use Pinterest? And there are certainly different degrees of quality when it comes to third party tools. It's possible that the most affordable third party tools might be the most popular with spammers. We, we don't know that, but it Makes sense.
- [29:25]
A
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So the ones that have done well as far as third party schedulers, done well with Pinterest. I mean, they're not the cheapest ones, right?
- [29:34]
B
That's true.
- [29:35]
A
That's for sure. And so that just means that those more expensive schedulers will attract people who have the money to invest in it. Which means that either they've got some upfront money, they're willing to invest in their new Pinterest business, or they're already very successful with Pinterest because they know how to create good pens and so they can afford these more expensive tools.
- [29:58]
B
Yeah, their business is proven to make money.
- [30:01]
A
So I would imagine some of these tools, if you were to look at the account quality, the Pinterest account quality of their users are probably higher than the account quality of these lower cost tools on average.
- [30:17]
B
Yeah. Just something to consider when you see all the lifetime deals that float around. Do you really want this for your lifetime?
- [30:23]
A
Yeah. And this just total speculation. I mean, if I were Pinterest and I was trying to figure out how to weed out spam, this would certainly be a signal that I would look at. Now, of course you can make up for it, you know, if you use a, a really cheap tool, you can make up for it with, you know, really great pens. You really gotta know what you're doing and having that higher quality engagement of your pens that outweighs that, you know, negative score on the tool that you're using. Assuming that there is one to begin with. We don't know.
- [30:52]
B
Well, I believe there is. And I mean, I think that we've talked about this before on the podcast. I don't believe in very many cases that Pinterest is made up of absolutes. As far as, like, the scale for, like, this is spam, this is not spam. I believe that it's like a scale like this is the straw that broke the camel's back. And this is why we see some accounts get away with using this particular schedule or this particular strategy and some accounts don't get away with it. And it's because of all the things going on underneath the surface that we don't see in general when we look at all those accounts. I kind of mentioned this earlier. When we look at all those accounts that are telling the stories about, you know, I started using a third party scheduler and my traffic skyrocketed. In general, we see that those accounts are putting out quality content because you're doing more quality content more consistently that contributes to long term success. You Know, scheduling out, kind of becoming hands off with lower quality content just contributes to less success. And one thing that I definitely see happen when people switch over to a third party scheduler is that whether they mean to or not, they take a step back from the control that they have on their account. When they're doing it manually, they're monitoring every single keyword that is being put into every single pin and they are looking at every single image with their eyes and choosing the board that it's going on. And every time you take yourself out of that equation and leave it to a scheduler, you are losing a little bit of control.
- [32:33]
A
Yeah. If you're not aware of it. Right. So going back to. If you're going to use a third party scheduler, being consistent with going back inside and looking at all of your pins that have been scheduled that ultimately ended up in your account, looking at all the different boards and just even if you're looking at the stats that way individually. Yeah, that's just a way to make up for it, to keep your, you know, eyes on the ground, what's really going on with your account.
- [32:59]
B
Yes. Yes.
- [33:01]
A
Okay. So those are some of the disadvantages. One of the other things that we mentioned strategies you can do is just do the kind of fly by the seat of your pants and just pin in real time. Right. Do you think there's an advantage of doing that?
- [33:14]
B
Anecdotally, yes.
- [33:17]
A
Okay.
- [33:19]
B
Could not support it with concrete data, but I have seen on loads of my experimental accounts reasons to believe that showing up and pinning in real time might have an advantage over the scheduler. I mean, and it could be as simple as what we were talking about earlier, the signals that you're giving to Pinterest about being a real engaged user. If you're pinning in real time versus anything scheduled out, it could be as simple as that could be something else. I don't know. I do think that eventually your account reaches a point where you can absolutely maintain traffic or even see growth over time just by using scheduled pins, especially for newer accounts. And I have heard from other people maintaining established accounts. I've heard too often about the advantages of pinning in real time to say that there absolutely can't be one. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out one day that there is one.
- [34:21]
A
Interesting. You know, this is a connection I haven't made until just talking about this. One of the things that I was looking into when I was building the chrome extension pinscriber for people who use it, you'll realize pretty Quickly. It can't populate your PIN description. It can populate the PIN title and the alt text, but not your description. You have to like copy and paste it. It will generate it for you with AI, but you literally have to, you can hit a button, click, copy and you have to paste it into the PIN description field.
- [34:54]
B
I didn't notice that when I used it. Oh, really?
- [34:57]
A
Yeah, because I mean, I noticed it.
- [34:58]
B
But I didn't think about it.
- [34:59]
A
That's funny. Yeah. So the reason why is because, okay, the PIN description field, it's very simple. It's just a text box. Right. Okay, on the surface, but underneath they're using like this third party script. You can, we can call it that. They've made a lot of their own adjustments to the code and it's really tricky to get a Chrome extension to interact with it. In order for it to work and it to not bug out, you literally have to type out the PIN description on your keyboard in real time. Because I can, I technically get, get it to populate with the AI generated description, but then it messes the whole thing up and you can't go in and you can't remove anything because it wasn't populated by using your keyboard and typing in real time. And I wonder like, why are they spending all of this development costs and resources for using this really fancy script for their pen description box? That should just be a simple text box. It's an HTML code. It's just a simple text area is what they call it. And they're not doing that specifically for.
- [36:15]
B
The pen description, but they've ensured that. I mean, we don't understand it, but I had a training on this in the previous version of my course that I originally made for my membership and I called it the PIN description glitch because I don't see the code things that you see, I don't read the code or know how to use anything. But they very clearly made sure that none of the extensions, the third party extensions, can create pins on our website and properly pull the description that we set just for that image. They've really gone to great lengths and obviously this is what you're talking about to make sure that's not happening. And when that happened, and I called it a glitch at the time, I assumed that it was because for Pinterest, there is more value in understanding what this user thinks this PIN is about than what the creator says this PIN is about. Over and over and over and over again, you're making new content on Pinterest when you create a pin with a new description versus just regurgitating someone else's content, this ties back into, you know, should you repin your own pins 50 times with the same image and the same description? I mean, I think not. We've probably got a whole episode on that. Do we? I don't know if we do, but this is part of the third party schedule or draw. For a lot of people who are not very familiar with this conversation, they believe, you know, I can create a pin, I can schedule that pin out 10 times, 20 times. We know people who do it hundreds of times and they think that they're getting more mileage out of the content they've created, when in reality what I think they're doing is sending signals to Pinterest that that like this is low quality content. But the description glitch, the way you're describing it, that lines up with what I believe about Pinterest in that Pinterest doesn't just want another copy of this thing that is the same. You're saying they want the user to tell Pinterest right now in real time what this pin is about to them.
- [38:28]
A
Yeah. I even tried to get the extension to emulate typing out in real time. So you could click a button and you could watch it populate in like one letter at a time in the pin description field automatically with the AI generated description, it would technically go in there, but it would glitch out on the whole thing. And honestly I didn't test it to see if I clicked the submit button if the whole PIN went through with that description. I'll have to go back and try that. But the whole thing glitched out because it's somehow it knows when you are manually putting in all the text there.
- [39:05]
B
Is this true for all the description fields. So like, you know, there's like the SEO description and there's like the display description and then there's like there's another one and if you edit the one that you can see it does not edit the other one. I wonder if this applies to all of them or if you could make it. I don't know if the SEO one matters in the platform or if they only count it for Google, but I do know like when I made this video about the description glitch, I was really deep in the weeds on the different kinds of descriptions.
- [39:40]
A
Yeah.
- [39:41]
B
And you can change one, but you can never change the other. Pinterest is married to that one. And it's weird. And it doesn't always come from the same place. I don't even think Pinterest knows where it comes from.
- [39:54]
A
I think they do it to maintain a certain level of quality control because you can really dupe people and the algorithm into putting a very relevant description at first. And then later on, once it starts to do really well, then you can go back and edit it and change the link and like, or mention, you know, particular, you know, weight loss product or whatever.
- [40:16]
B
And that pin's already doing well. And then it.
- [40:18]
A
Yeah, and so Pinterest knows, okay, we can't let this influence the algorithm. We have the original description for it and maybe that's what they go off of. And that's why it's one of the reasons why I don't recommend. It's worth your time to go back in and modify description or any part of a pin.
- [40:33]
B
I always. I don't think there's any value in modifying a pin, period. Just go and make new pins.
- [40:39]
A
That's right.
- [40:40]
B
But that is just very interesting, the thing that you've explained about a pinscriber, it's already saving me so much time to be able to copy and paste the description from the same page without having to change tabs that I don't care if you can't get it to populate right in there. It's already such a time saver.
- [40:59]
A
Yeah, for sure. All right, so, I mean, we've kind of been weaving some of the advantages of the Pinterest native scheduler and some of the disadvantages. But what are. Let's just be clear. Let's go through a list of the advantages which, honestly, like, I think we had a hard time coming up with this list. It's not very long.
- [41:19]
B
No, because the native scheduler is actually not very user friendly. It is extremely difficult to use. To be fair, it is cheaper because it is free with your Pinterest account. You know, we know that it keeps users connected to the platform and in tune with what's going on on the platform. If you're actually logging into Pinterest and using it, we believe that it's a good sign to Pinterest that you're a real person. And we know that in the future, if Pinterest ever goes like, okay, well, this pin was created with this extension, so that's bad. We know that they're not likely to do that with the pins that were actually created on their own platform. So being directly connected to Pinterest, I believe has inherent safety built into it. But that is basically it. For the advantages. It's not awesome to use that doesn't. I'm gonna keep using it.
- [42:14]
A
Yeah. Right. So what are the disadvantages then?
- [42:17]
B
Well, it's. It requires more of a time investment. Like I said, it's very clunky. You know, you like to keep track of things. You've mentioned that it's hard to keep track of things. I don't keep track of anything, so I don't care about.
- [42:30]
A
Unless it's in a binder.
- [42:31]
B
Yeah, I threw that away physical.
- [42:33]
A
Okay.
- [42:34]
B
Don't have it anymore. Um, but you. You've come up with ways to keep track of your pins, and you're obviously doing fine that way.
- [42:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, I use Notion. They've got a calendar feature, so we can just fill in on the calendar. Often we'll do the weekly view, and you can just see, like, every day. All right, which pins are gonna go. But it's just creating a lot of extra work for us because we have to then get the pins first loaded up into Notion, everything about them, and then we have to repeat that process, actually putting it into Pinterest. So it's increasing a lot of the work, that's for sure.
- [43:08]
B
Yes. But if everything that we believe about the benefits of the scheduler are true, which it's not saying they are, but if they are, then you're probably also increasing the money you make by doing it, because otherwise you would lose money, you know, if your account starts to decline or if in the future, Pinterest goes like, no, that particular tool. We don't like those pins. And they just ax however many of your pins because of that. So. So, I mean, I think it's all relative.
- [43:36]
A
Okay, so. Okay, so say someone has been listening to us talk for, oh, my gosh, 45 minutes or so about this, and they have always been using a scheduler.
- [43:48]
B
You mean a third party scheduler?
- [43:49]
A
Yeah, a third party scheduler. And now they realize, oh, Carly and Tony. They do not. And they have their own good reasons. Maybe I should not use a third party scheduler and switch to the native. What would you say to that person who's considering it?
- [44:04]
B
If your account is doing very well right now using a third party scheduler, and you still feel like you want to start to transition to the native scheduler, I would make that. That change very slowly. I would start logging into Pinterest every couple days and pinning a few pins, actually pinning them manually, like right now, right now, in real time. And then after a couple weeks of that, I would pin a couple in real time and schedule a couple and so then you like slowly start using the schedule and then slowly dial back the pins that are going out in the third party scheduler until you're done. I try to avoid making any very sudden movements on Pinterest.
- [44:43]
A
That's good advice. Okay, maybe that was part of my problem when I switched from Pinterest to a third party schedule reel. I think we just did it.
- [44:50]
B
Bam, bam. Yeah, you scared the platform very badly.
- [44:54]
A
Which tends to be the way, like, I will operate, like, once we make a decision, like, let's just go for it.
- [44:59]
B
Oh, yeah, I understand that. I'm the same way when it comes to Pinterest. I really believe in no sudden moves. And so on the flip side of that too, I would also recommend, like, if you are somebody who really wants to try a reputable third party scheduler that you've done your research on, you know that it's Pinterest approved and you've got 10 friends that are using it and they've had great success or whatever. I also would recommend do it slowly. You know, keep doing what you're doing right now, add in a few pins weekly with the scheduler until you get up to where you want to be. Just no sudden movements.
- [45:35]
A
But you set up Pinterest approved. What do you mean by that? Wanna elaborate?
- [45:40]
B
Well, I'm hoping you'll elaborate because I don't use third party schedulers. I've never bothered truly understanding what that means.
- [45:49]
A
Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. So I spent a little bit of time researching this. Okay. So technically, you know, anyone can go out and they can create, you know, Pinterest API account and they can create their own scheduler. So every third party schedule out there, you uses the Pinterest API, allows their software to talk to Pinterest software to be able to move your Pinterest pins from their scheduler over to the platform. But then there are some that are like our approved partners where Pinterest will go and they will review every application that has used their API to create some sort of scheduling tool or some other type of tool, and they will go and have someone manually review it and approve it. So technically, anything, any app that you use that interfaces with Pinterest and the API, they've been approved by Pinterest. But there's another level of approval and vetting that Pinterest goes through. And I think they call it like partners or something. Okay, yeah, so that there are some third party scheduling tools that are like approved partners. And so the assumption would be you could trust them more because They've gone through the extra vetting process.
- [47:05]
B
Yes. You can read the list on Business Pinterest. Com, and then you can search for Pinterest business partner and there's a list. Yeah, I mean, I do think that it's what you're describing. Like, we're just like, literally anybody can do this. When you apply for this API account like you described, you don't have to do anything to prove that you're not breaking their terms of service to get approved for that API account. Right.
- [47:32]
A
Say that again.
- [47:33]
B
So Pinterest also has, like, terms of service that you. You have explained these to me before. Like, you're not allowed to store the data and stuff, but just to get approved for the API account and make the tool work, nobody's actually checking up on that in real time. It's kind of like you might end up using a tool that is breaking Pinterest terms of service. That doesn't mean it won't work on Pinterest. It just means it's not safe for your account long term. Is that the right understanding that I have of that?
- [48:03]
A
Yeah, because there, there are tools out there that I know that if you were to connect your Pinterest account to them and use the tool, you would be breaking the terms of service.
- [48:14]
B
Yes. Okay. That's what I mean. But the approved ones.
- [48:16]
A
Mm.
- [48:17]
B
It's very likely that that's not true of any of them.
- [48:20]
A
Yeah. Right. So that's correct.
- [48:22]
B
Okay.
- [48:22]
A
I don't know what the, you know, vetting process look like. I've heard that it can be very expensive to have an official partner. So there's that. But yeah, so you. So just be careful that it's. That they're reputable, that they've been around for a while. That's. That's an advantage. Right. Time will be very revealing on the value and the quality of, of a tool.
- [48:45]
B
Yeah. And the problem with time is that it has to pass before we know how that's going to shake out. And so. So I just believe that the safest thing that you can do is make use of a native scheduler. We went to Florida in October, and I just couldn't be showing up at my account every day. And so I hooked up a third party scheduler and I used it. And there was no hard feelings between Pinterest and myself for those 20 days that I scheduled pins out. I think, you know, it's fine. We did, like, gradually move into it. We did not flip a switch overnight. I knew I was going on vacation for two Weeks beforehand, we started trickling pins out and we trickled them off on the other end too. But I really believe that it's good practice to use the native, the native schedule, the native pinning process in general. And now that you have started to develop new tools that make the native scheduler more user friendly, like the pinscriber tool and even the Pinner analytics tool, because, you know, we won't have to rely on a third party tool for those analytics. I believe the native scheduler and the native scheduling process is just going to get easier and easier with you involved. And so I'm super excited about that.
- [50:02]
A
Yeah, that's good. I mean, I'm mainly building them for myself. I could use them. So if nobody else uses them, that's.
- [50:07]
B
Cool, I'll use them.
- [50:08]
A
I can use them, you can use them. They're valuable. So, yeah, I started to make more tools and I created a new resource. If you wanted to like, find out all these tools that I'm creating, just go to pinnertools.com there's some free ones in there, there's some paid ones, so check that out. All right, let's end with your number one tip about schedulers. You said something earlier as we were playing out this episode and I was like, ooh, that's, that's really good. I didn't think about it, um, as it relates to if you're going to create a new Pinterest account, I believe.
- [50:40]
B
That if you are going to create a new Pinterest account, the best thing that you can do is PIN natively until it becomes established. And established is whatever is established for you, you know, whenever it's time for you to move on from showing up at that account every single day. But if you are involved in the creation of all your pins, and if you are pin putting in the 100% effort to every pin, those are the accounts that I've seen be the most successful.
- [51:08]
A
Exactly. Because it forces you to be inside the platform. And when you're doing that to go schedule a pin, you might see a little notification that someone had just saved one of your pins or someone had made a comment. And then you can go and, you know, reply to that comment or heart it, whatever. And so these are just subtle little mental things that you're, your brain is processing kind of behind the scenes and it's going to make you more in tune with the platform. And it's something that can be a disadvantage for me where I've got like a whole team of people who are doing all the pinning for me, I'm actually intentionally spending more time inside the platform every once in a while, be creating pins, testing different ideas and just to stay inside the platform. And I want to, you know, walk the talk here with this. And so that's just really important to do for, I don't know, at least the first three, six months or so. What would you say?
- [52:02]
B
Yeah, you know, we don't know if there is like a sandbox that exists, but all we could do is look at the data that we have historically, which is challenging because Pinterest is always changing going forward and we're always looking backwards for clues. But over and over and over again, since at least 2019, we have seen that pins can take anywhere from on a very strong account, a few weeks, up to eight months to start to pick up and take off. And I have had my own accounts that have done nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then at the eight month mark, they've become real, you know, exciting accounts to watch grow. And so I would say at a minimum, you should be involved in that account regularly for six months. I don't know. Do you think that's enough time?
- [52:52]
A
Yeah, yeah. That's a long time. That's half a year.
- [52:56]
B
Yeah. I don't believe in like passive income, really, for most people.
- [53:04]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Which is too bad. Yeah. Pinterest is not passive income for the most part. Yeah. All right, well, we've talked about this for an hour. We had wondered in the beginning how long this was going to be.
- [53:17]
B
I thought it would be less.
- [53:18]
A
Yeah, we always do. Somehow. We talked this one all the way through, I think. I don't know, maybe you are listening and you have some questions, some things that we didn't talk about that you were hoping we would, when it comes to schedulers, reach out to us in one of our communities. We'd love to answer and help you out. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode. 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.