← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E6 Why Your Pinterest Account Is a Snowflake
00:25:01
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- [00:02]
A
Hey, welcome to pintalk, the go to 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? And why.
- [00:14]
B
So we are going to talk about how not every Pinterest account is the same and how one size fits all does not apply to Pinterest accounts and strategies and why that is. And do you want to share why we want to talk about this?
- [00:32]
A
Yeah. So if you noticed, our podcast episodes are a little long. And actually, I haven't had a lot of complaints about it. Maybe one or two people. Yeah. And I've been wondering, like, why are they so long? And it kind of hit me today, actually, after we just finished recording an episode that was like an hour and a half. And the reason why is because it's just so nuanced. You and I, we have our own communities for Pinterest creators, and every day, people are in there asking questions. Every day, all year long, year after year, even though there are plenty of YouTube videos out there, courses, articles that explain how to do Pinterest, people still have a million questions because every Pinterest account is its own little unique snowflake. And so, you know, that's what it is at the end of the day. And so that's why we just have these long. So maybe sometimes it feels a little long winded episodes. There's just a lot to discuss, a lot to cover. There are many different use cases or scenarios or ways that. Well, there's a caveat over here. Okay, well, now you have to consider this over here. And also, I just wanted to point out that this podcast, our intention is not to have, like a perfectly polished. Here's a question, here's our answer. We're going to be teaching you step by step how to do this, how to do that. The kind of stuff you might find on YouTube, for example, that's like 10, 15 minutes, very practical type of videos. Like, we're not here to teach necessarily. We're here to. Honestly, we're just recording our own conversations that we're already having. And we just thought there were some really good, valuable information that we gained personally from these conversations. Right. Like, we have aha. Moments and stuff that we're constantly learning.
- [02:24]
B
I think one of the reasons that I am always constantly learning when I talk with you is because not every account is the same. And so over the years, in my little Pinterest bubble of the people that I reach who are approaching Pinterest similarly to how I am. And then you're over there doing Pinterest your way, and now there's people out there approaching Pinterest similar to the way that you're doing it. And we, like, put our accounts in these boxes, and now we start having these conversations where I've had to open my mind up to so many different things that can work on the platform or do work on the platform. Do, like, categorically, you can't necessarily say that in all niches, they don't work. And so our conversations are really colliding. A very different account and strategy, application niches, user intent, all those things very different. And it has really brought into the way that I am thinking about Pinterest now. I have always known that all Pinterest accounts are different. And in my course, I take the approach of what is the most safe recommendation that I can give for the worst Pinterest niche? And I think I explained it that way in my course or something like that. And I say something like, everybody wants an exact number of pins, and that doesn't exist. And I explained that in my course. But then I say, so I've made an arbitrary framework, and here's the. And somebody has actually quoted this part back to me, and they were like, do you know what my favorite part of your course was? It was the part where you're like, here's an arbitrary framework, and then I give it out. The reason it's arbitrary is because you cannot take, I do A, B, C, D, E on my Pinterest account, and it cannot paste it onto that Pinterest account in a different niche, with a different creator, with different users, with different intent, and expect success. And so it has been really, really good. Even over the years, even though I knew they weren't all the same, I still built a box around Pinterest accounts. But then getting to know you has brought back to the surface, rebubbled up the idea that every account is not the same and you cannot apply the same strategy to every account.
- [04:37]
A
So does that mean people shouldn't listen to what we say or what others say? How do they decide what to listen to, what to take away and what to ignore?
- [04:50]
B
Well, I personally think that because of this, people should listen to us because. Because I think that we are making this consideration. And I think there's a lot of, you know, when you go on YouTube and you search, how many boards should I have? How many boards should I create for a new account? So we had this conversation on the last episode of the podcast, episode Five was our board strategy, and we talked about how we have different number of boards that we create. The reason that we create different number of boards is because we're creating different kinds of content and different kinds of content requirements. A different board strategy. So if you Google this, you go to a YouTube video and you come up with somebody who's telling you you need to create 10 boards, and then six months later, you need to create 10 boards later. Now, my course does actually kind of do that. It gives, like, a range that you should create. But that's because I've defaulted to the safest recommendations for what I think is safe broadly. But because we are approaching all our conversations with the consideration that all the accounts are different, I think you'll hear from us. There's no number. There is no number of boards that you have to create when you start your account. Like, is that a question that you could answer?
- [06:07]
A
I usually just answer with seven.
- [06:09]
B
Seven.
- [06:10]
A
Okay, seven. That's my number. No, I can't. It's impossible. Yeah.
- [06:16]
B
And so I think people who are giving a definitive number without a really good defense for that number, I would question why they're doing that. And therefore, I think people should listen to us.
- [06:30]
A
Right. Because even if that person gave you those numbers and they revealed their Pinterest account so you could go and look at it and basically model what they do, Pinterest is still going to respond differently to your account versus theirs. There's a reason why. Do you want to explain your. You talked about the engineering blog and some things that they talked about there.
- [06:52]
B
Okay. Yeah. So how many pins per day Are we going to have a future episode on how many pins per day you should pin? But that's a good question that we often relate to. Oh, if I pin a hundred pins per day, I might get flagged as spam. It's not that simple. The engineering blog lays it out really, really clearly for us that being flagged as spam, there might be certain actions you can take that will automatically flag you as spam. And I'm just saying that how many pins per day is not one of those. But being flagged as spam is the result of an equation of actions that you have taken. If you do action A plus action B plus action C equals spam flag. So they give us that example. They give us an A plus B plus C example. In the engineering block, we'd be crazy to think that's the only one that exists. There's also going to be, if you do action A and you do Action C, and you do action F, and you do action F3 more times, then you get flagged as spam. That's also going to be an equation that's in there. And so I can try to replicate your account, but without literally knowing every single action you've taken. And these actions are going to be as subtle as. You use this word too often that you. And I'm not saying a word like salad. I'm saying like a one word that they give as an example could potentially be a questionable word is ivory, because it can relate to animal poaching, elephant poaching. So ivory is. It's a word that they have actually called out as, like, they watch content around ivory. If I've used this word, like, you can't just go in and copy somebody's account with all of their same descriptions. You won't succeed because you need to be introducing new ideas. So you're going to use different descriptions and you might accidentally use the wrong words. And so it can be as simple as that. If you want to replicate someone's account and you try to create all their boards, and you're doing that, and you create too many boards in one hour. There is a limit on how many boards you can pin in an hour, how many pins you can pin in an hour. They'll say like, oops, you can't do that right now. I can't remember what it is. Yeah, I've run into it in the years, years, years past.
- [09:07]
A
But, wow, I never would have guessed you would have been the one to run into that.
- [09:10]
B
But I used to be a volume pinner, not you.
- [09:14]
A
Slash spammer.
- [09:16]
B
Slash spammer, yes. So you just. It's impossible to think that you're gonna do every single action identical to somebody else. Therefore replicating an account isn't the way forward. But understanding this is also the reason why you might talk to somebody who will say, like, I started pinning 15 pins a day and my traffic fell right off. I'm obviously in the spam. And it's obviously because of that. No, it's not. It's because you did this action, which might have been a crazy anomaly for your account. Plus A and B, you don't even know what those are that you did. That kind of makes it sound hopeless. I didn't mean to make it sound hopeless. I'm just saying there's all these equations working in the background. We don't know what they are. And therefore every account's different.
- [10:03]
A
Right. The way I'm looking at it is like a Soundboard. So say, okay, Taylor Swift, she goes and she tours all over the world, right? And every venue is different. And so she's got a whole team of people who do, like, the sound engineering, right? And they've got this huge soundboard with all these switches and dials and sliders to adjust the sound. And it's not going to look exactly the same in every single venue, because every venue is unique in the acoustics and the number of people that show up. And I don't know, maybe Taylor kind of changes their performance a little bit, and so they have to account for that. And so they're constantly changing those dials for every single one. And that's kind of the same way I'm looking at it behind the scenes from Pinterest algorithms perspective is there's just a lot of dials for every account, and they're all gonna be turned and, you know, have a slider on different values. And so it's just impossible to compare your account to someone else's even in the same niche. Like, I have multiple accounts in the same niche, and Pinterest treats them differently. I mean, one obvious reason is that, like, one is older than the others, and so there's a certain level of, you know, history and authority that's built on that account. You know what I mean? So you can. And even with the newer accounts, like, still, I haven't created, like, two accounts at the same exact time, same niche, and targeted the same exact topics, maybe with different texts. Like, I've never done that before. But even then, I would imagine it would still respond differently, even as simple as the profile picture. One profile picture might resonate with users more than the other when they see it in their feed. Interesting.
- [11:45]
B
Yeah. The fact that we're working with content that is going out to humans makes the whole thing unpredictable because it's about those humans and how they're gonna respond to that content at the end of the day. So, I mean, when we talk about the dials and the sliders and stuff, to me you can get, like, it's. We're saying it's different even across niches, but then you consider that we're talking to people who are working in totally different niches than we are. And it is even more different because they're talking to different end users. Even if all the dials and sliders were set at the same place, it's still going to be treated differently based on how the end user interacts with it. And I don't know how much of it is down to luck. I do think there is a tiny. Just a little bit, especially in those early days. Like some people probably fail for no other reason than Pinterest didn't get their early pins out in front of the right people and therefore their early pins got no engagement and therefore they failed. Now, I don't think that's very many. I think Pinterest is pretty good if the pin is good at getting it in front of the right people. But I'm sure there is a percentage of people for who this is true. And the solution for those people would be to start a new account. I think we can't know if we're those people or not. I'm just saying that you can't just say like, this account failed for this reason, because there are accounts for that. I look at and I'm like, there's literally nothing wrong with this. Couldn't put my thumb on the problem to save my life. And I think that sometimes those are the problem.
- [13:20]
A
That's a little scary as a creator to see, especially when accounts get banned and completely shut down. Like, there was someone this week, they posted in my community that their account was banned by Pinterest and of course I couldn't see it because it's shut down. But I asked them to send me a DM with some example pins that they've created and they look totally fine to me. They look normal. They look like they would be pins that people would engage with and save. So there was some other factor. I have no idea what it was. Well, in this particular case, what the person did is jump to conclusions. And the fact that they had started using a third party scheduler, so now they're blaming it on the third party scheduler, even though I know people who are successful right now using that same scheduler. And so I'd hate for you as a listener to jump to conclusions as well, where you see someone posting on Facebook or in a forum that someone's account was banned because they switched to a third party scheduler recently. And so now you use that scheduler and you're like, okay, I need to stop using it. Or you start talking trash about it, like that usually is not the case. There's way more to it underneath the surface that you just don't know. And even that person who owned the account, they just don't know.
- [14:39]
B
So I would say that the use of the scheduler could be part of it. It could be a part of that equation, though. You don't know what other actions they have taken. Sure Then this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Whereas, because accounts are so different, maybe my account. So for my new account, I know I've brought up the new account a few times on this podcast. I recently was on vacation. We were gone for two and a half weeks, and I wanted to pin out more pins while I was gone. And I didn't want to have to be going to Pinterest all the time. And so I very hesitantly did attach a third party scheduler to it. And that has gone fine, but maybe that has gone fine because the account had already met this milestone and this milestone and this milestone that Pinterest checks before you're allowed to attach a third party scheduler. Or maybe I hadn't done this thing and this thing and this thing that equals, oh, no, now they've attached a third party scheduler, and now it's a problem. We can't know what those things are. And so I think the point of this episode is just to really try to shed light on the fact that it is so important to really develop an understanding about what's happening around your account and to have a broader knowledge of how Pinterest works in general so that you can develop ideas around what might work for your account, what might not.
- [16:03]
A
Okay. So one way to do that is to be a part of Pinterest communities where you can see people reporting about their wins and what's working, but also you can see people are reporting, like, issues that they're having. Now, the downside of that is it's a bummer when someone, like, posts a screenshot of where you just see their traffic just falling off a cliff and they're wondering what's going on? And so people are trying to help, and they're asking them questions like, what niche are you in? How many pins per day were you doing? How many, you know, new URLs were you adding? And, like, asking all these questions, and I don't think they're the right questions to ask. What do you think?
- [16:44]
B
I definitely ask those questions when I see someone's traffic has fallen off. Well, I guess because that's my job and I have to start somewhere and I can't. I can't just be like, I don't know, sorry, so. So I have to start somewhere. Do I usually do start with what's your niche? Because I have seen people post about their traffic falling off in November, and I asked them what their niche is, and they're like, it's gardening. And I'm like, okay, we're not worried. And so I do start by narrowing down that way because sometimes there are really easy things that I can see that I can determine what might be the cause of the problem. There might not actually be a problem. Sometimes asking those questions helps me determine that there is no problem. Or sometimes, you know, I'll ask what niche they're in. They'll say, home decor. And I'll say, how many pins are you putting? And they'll say one per day. And I'll say, well, in the current climate, that is actually probably not enough to be competitive. And so I think there's some value to those questions. Maybe within the context of the Pinterest knowledge that I have, maybe they wouldn't be valuable questions just to start asking if you don't have any other. Like, if I was just gonna say, like, oh, wait, you were posting 90 pins a day. That's definitely the problem. That there's no benefit in that. Cause I'd be wrong. I mean, it wouldn't be definitely the problem. So I ask questions just to see if there's anything that is, that is obvious. But then beyond the obvious, you're right. There's lots that we can't discover with those questions.
- [18:13]
A
Yeah, yeah, you change my mind. Because there are. Okay, there are some people who are new. Like recently someone in my forum, like, they saw their traffic really start to drop. And we are in the holiday season right now, and they are not in a niche that is holiday oriented really at all. And the kind of content they're creating. And so they have, they have to learn the hard way. Like all of us, they're like, hey, this time of year there's just gonna be some niches that are just going to drop in traffic. And that's just part of the ride that we're on with Pinterest. But they wouldn't have that context if they weren't part of a community of some sort to be able to ask the questions. And for people who have that experience to chime in, and so you know that that's where it is, it is important to ask, well, what niche in are you in and what time of year is it? And like, did Pinterest recently have a shuffle or algorithm update at the same time that you, like, created a brand new account? Who knows how that impacts things? There's just so many, so many factors here. I think all this stems from this whole conversation, this podcast episode stems from people asking questions with concern because their traffic has dropped from Pinterest. Or maybe they got banned with their account. And so they're just trying to figure out what is going on. Why did I lose my account? Why did my traffic drop? And like, Carly and I are working on a resource for that. I've compiled a pretty good sized list of possible reasons why Carly's contributed that as well. And she's gonna help me flesh out some of these things to make them, like, practical and hopefully can be a good resource for people. But at the end of the day, like, there are still tons of accounts that we'll look at when traffic has dropped and we're just like, I, we don't know. It's, it's so weird. It's so frustrating. And I know it can be very difficult for people who have recently come over to Pinterest from Google, because with Google hcu, their site got crushed. They lost all the traffic, so they fired up a Pinterest account. It's doing really well. And then all of a sudden it starts crashing and they're just like, what do I do? What's going on? And again, there's just so. There's so many factors here at play that we just can't give you a concrete answer. Even if we got to see your account and see the pins that you were creating. Sometimes it's obvious, right? Especially with newer people at the platform and they just, there's just a lot that they have to learn. It just can get into a community of some sort. For Pinterest, there's so much that you can learn that's gonna help you, especially in those times, but also avoiding some of those things. So that's kind of my thoughts on it.
- [20:51]
B
I think if the only takeaway that people have from this is that accounts are so different, we can't know what's going on, that's very hopeless. So I would, I would add, like, accounts are so different and that's why it's so important that the people who are successful and who have been successful for a very long time, I would, I would add, beware of people who have been successful for six weeks and that's it. And now they're going to tell you how to do Pinterest. I think that having the history and the context is really important. And so if we take all of the things that we know about running a very successful Pinterest account, or, you know, multiple accounts, and the things that we have also been able to gather from our audiences about running successful Pinterest accounts, we can distill so much down to what are the things that we can do that will make us successful. And just going back to, you know, why the podcast episode's so long. It's just because in every episode we do, we find that we have to give these exceptions or specific cases because that is the only way to really provide value broadly. And so I feel like we're doing a good job of exploring all of the account differences that there are out there and still giving people a way forward where they don't need to feel like every account's different. So there's no hope. I don't think we need to feel that way, no.
- [22:23]
A
And I've got this dream of having like a survey that I put together of people who have had account drops, like to answer a bunch of questions. It would need to be a large scale survey, like one day I'll do it if I can, and maybe just start collecting some data about that and be able to just turn around and be able to share that information to see if there are some patterns. Because there are. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I believe I've done well with the platform, is because I can spot patterns. Taking the time to look at the data, to look at how things are going and drawing some conclusions, testing some new things, I can get kind of scientific about it. That's just my natural way of approaching a lot of things. It just comes from that trial and error and seeing what works, what doesn't. And that's why just encourage you as you're listening, it's good to listen to others take it with a grain of salt. Also, try things for yourself. Don't go too crazy like penning way too many pens in one day. But there's no, like, official, you know, book on a manual on like, exactly how to do this and you'll succeed with every single account that you create, unfortunately. But we have enough experience of our own and have seen and worked with other account creators, other Pinterest creators who have done well, and we've spotted a lot of patterns. And that's, I think, behind what a lot of things that we teach are.
- [23:58]
B
These patterns, even though there's not a one size fits all strategy that we can, that we can spout for Pinterest, there are absolutely patterns on the platform that we can build the strategy for our own accounts around.
- [24:14]
A
Yep. Okay. Well, I think that's a great place to end it. Yeah. This was probably our shortest episode to explain why our episodes are so long. But if you still have questions about why your account is such a wonderful, unique snowflake or maybe it's not a wonderful snowflake and it's dwindling. Send us an email pentalkpodcastmail.com or ask in one of our communities if you're a part of our community. 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.