← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Do followers matter on Pinterest? (Plus, some updates!)
00:20:02
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin podcast. I hope that you've enjoyed the last three episodes in our Summer Story series. I know that July is normally a really busy month for people when it comes to travel. In fact, I started traveling June 15th. I went to the TBEX conference in Quebec City. If you are a travel content creator, I highly encourage you to go. I've spoke at their conference the last two years and I walk away every time. So inspired by their community connection, by their connection with sponsors, by just this overall sense of a rising tide lifts all boats. They are an incredible community. I felt like the teaching was great. They have not paid to sponsor this episode at all. But I just when you have a good experience and you want to pass on a recommendation to people, you want to pass that on. So if you're a travel content creator and this is something that you're leaning into over the next several months or years, TBEX T B E X is highly something I highly recommend. So I was in Quebec City and then I got home and a few days later I left on vacation with my husband and to the Grand Cayman. And then a couple days later after I got home, I left to go to Ireland with my mom and my sister. It was a whirlwind of trips. In fact, more people than I can count looked at me and said, are you absolutely crazy? And yes, I probably was. But I survived and I am here now and ready to kick off all of this. So before we dive into today's episode, which is about followers on Pinterest, which surprisingly we still get a lot of questions about that, I'm going to go into that in a minute, but I want to address a few things that have happened over this time. When I have been traveling, I've still been keeping a pulse on everything, paying attention to what's happening. So a couple of things. One, we saw the reporting in Google Analytics GA4, as some people call it, of Pinterest traffic suddenly move from from Pinterest to direct. Now this is very upsetting and also really unfortunate because at first it looked like an extreme loss of traffic, as if all of a sudden overnight nobody was clicking on pins, but the traffic has not gone away. It's just been recounted differently. If you are a person who runs ads on your website, what you know is that you get paid differently based on where the traffic is coming from, where the source is. And Pinterest is for most people a high paying traffic. So if all of a sudden you're not getting traffic from Pinterest, then you're not getting paid as much. I have reached out to Pinterest and it is on their radar. But what they have said back to me is they really have no control over Google because it's a third party platform. And so some options are to use UTM codes which sound absolutely terrible, or to wait until it resolves itself. We are still digging to figure out what is happening. I'll just tell you as of the time of recording, which is like late July, we still don't have an answer to this. So there's that number two. We saw Pinterest go through and mark a bunch of accounts as not as spam but copyright complaints. Right. Like they're doing a lot of work behind the scenes. If you ever get a copyright complaint, it is very easy to one look at is it your pin? Is it a PIN on your account? If it's not, you can sometimes just ignore it. If it's your pin, then there's a way to file a complaint against that, a reversal. So just follow the prompts when you get them, get the notification if it's your pin. But we did see that happen to a lot of people. If you've not been affected by either and you don't even know what I'm talking about, that is okay, you don't have to worry about it. But just know that we've had a few bumpy situations this summer. Also, there is still a lot of interest in the Visit site button. We do have a post on our blog on our website about this Visit site button and if it's been removed on your pins. So I'll link that below in the description. So if you have any issues, you can go down and check that out. Okay. Today's episode really is covering do followers matter on Pinterest? I want to revisit this question that kind of continues to perplex marketers. Do follower counts on Pinterest actually matter? And while most social platforms have us obsessing over follower numbers as a primary metric of success, Pinterest does not. And the way that I'm going to show you this is I'm going to take four different examples that are going to challenge your assumptions about follower counts and show you what metrics actually truly drive Pinterest success. So if whether or not you're new to Pinterest, which actually we find that this question about follower counts tend to be mostly those people who are new or they're taking their understanding of other platforms and kind of overlaying on pinterest or if maybe you've been around for a while, but now you're coming back to Pinterest and you're asking yourself that question. Okay, followers didn't matter before, but do they matter now? Okay, so join me as we walk through this episode as to why your follower count might not be the most powerful indicator of success you've been led to believe. Real quick too. Q4 is coming up. That is a really high traffic time on Pinterest. If you are all interested in somebody managing your account so you can focus back on your e commerce store, on creating your content, we would love to meet with you. Just go to simplepenmedia.com services and you can book a discussion discovery call with us. Okay, so over the years you've heard people say, I have x thousands of followers on Instagram or my TikTok following just hit this milestone. Follower counts tend to have a lot of emphasis, which makes sense because if you're looking at TikTok, if you're looking at Instagram, there's this thing where the more usually equals the more engagement, right? Like the more followers equals more engagement. So logic would have you believe that all social media platforms really operate in that same way. But what's interesting is that Pinterest is always been focused on content first, following second. So what we've noticed over the years, and I started asking this question, really at the beginning of when I started my company back in 2014, did follower counts mean that people got more traffic or they got more saves? And what I found back then was like, well, no, there's not really a correlation between more followers equaling more traffic. And then what I noticed is that you could kind of manipulate the followers. Either you could ask people in your community to follow you, or you could pin a bunch of other people's stuff and you would get followers that way. But it never translated to getting more clicks and saves. Okay? So I wanted to take and look at it in 2024, 10 years later, and ask myself the question, has this view of followers changed? In fact, just recently, we had a couple new clients ask us that question. Should I be focused on growing my followers? Should I call people to action to follow me? And at the end of this, I hope that you will have a really clear answer. So I'm going to walk through these four examples. So example number one, in October, this account had 108,000 followers and they saw 35,000 Pinterest sessions. Okay? So a hundred thousand followers, 35,000 clicks to their website in November, their followers increased to 108,739. They got about 600 new followers in a month, yet their sessions jumped 5,000. So a 15% increase in traffic with less than 1% of followers. Now we get to December, which is really revealing. They added 800 new followers, but their sessions skyrocketed to 64,000. That's an 82% increase in traffic from October with just a 1.3% follower growth. So while the follower count grew incrementally, pretty slowly, the actual traffic merely doubled. So if followers were truly a driving metric of success, we would expect more kind of proportional changes that 1% growth. So it was a 1.3% follower growth. We might expect it to be right around 1%, but that didn't happen. They had an 82% traffic increase. What's really happening here is that the Pinterest algorithm is distributing content based on relevance, quality, and user engagement, and not just to followers, which is why you can see a dramatic traffic increase without a significant amount of follower growth. So again, There was only 1.3% in follower growth, but an 82% increase in sessions. Okay, so the takeaway again from this one is content matters. Because if content is great, Pinterest will distribute it out to a lot of people. Now, one of the things I didn't mention in the beginning, which I think is really important for people to understand, is that the home feed, which is what you see when you open your Pinterest app, is a combination of things that you're interested in, people you follow, ads that are distributed to you, and new interests that you might discover that in the things that you are interested in are based on your searches, based on your saves. They're not interested in just pulling from your fault. People you follow. They really want to make meaning. They as Pinterest, your home feed, so curated to you that it really doesn't matter if you follow somebody or not. It's based on your interest. Okay, you tracking with me? Okay, this is actually really fascinating. Example number two. In October, this account had a follower account of 218,000, which is twice as many followers as our previous example. Yet this account generated 9,000 sessions from Pinterest. Okay, 9,000. Just as reference, the first one had a hundred thousand followers and got 34,000 sessions in this same month. Now, in one month moving to November, they gained 50 new followers and their traffic increased to 10,000. So it was about a 12% traffic boost in that month. But honestly, 50 new followers, that was it. Then in December, something interesting happened. Their follower count actually decreased, yet their sessions dropped more significantly by 15% to 8,400. So their follower count, while it decreased, their traffic decreased even more. So this account has double the followers of our first example, yet it generated only a fraction of the traffic. So you would think with 218,000 followers, they are going to be generating a lot. But an account with 218,000 followers generated just 13% of the traffic of an account with 109,000 followers in the same month. Again, what matters isn't how many followers you have, but rather how the Pinterest algorithm distributes your content. Okay, example number three. So this example, they give a lot of new content to Pinterest. They're constantly creating new images, they're constantly creating new content. So just keep that in mind because this is fascinating. So in October, we're just doing the same time frame, this account had 98,000 followers, fewer than both of our previous examples. Yet they had a staggering 348,000 sessions coming from Pinterest. That is 10 times the traffic of our first example. Despite having 10,000 fewer followers in November, they added 350 new followers, which is obviously a minimal increase, but their sessions actually decreased to 303,000. That's still an impressive number of traffic, but it represents a 13% drop despite gaining those followers. Then in December, they continued to gain followers, reaching 98,500, but their sessions decreased even further to 261, a 25% traffic decline from October. This case is perhaps the most powerful illustration yet of why follower counts can be misleading. Here we have an account with the fewest followers of all three examples, yet it consistently generates the highest traffic by far, between four to 30 times more sessions than accounts with higher follower numbers. So what is this account doing differently? They're likely creating highly searchable, relevant content that the Pinterest algorithm is distributing out regardless. I know I've said this three times already, of how many people actually follow them. Now, don't get stuck on this traffic decrease as well. I know some people are thinking like, why did their traffic decrease? Sometimes it can be that that is not their highest traffic time. They could be somebody who thrives in Q3 or even Q1. Just know that there's. That variable is not on the table here. But looking at follower count in correlation to Pinterest sessions, example number four. This is our final example, which might be the most encouraging yet for those just starting out on Pinterest. So in October, this account only had 4,000 followers. We wanted to make sure that we weren't taking these accounts with huge, huge numbers, but we were looking at ones that had a lower number of followers. So this is yet a fraction of what we've seen in these previous examples. Yet they generated nearly 17,000 sessions, which is almost double the traffic of our second example. Despite having just 2% of the followers in November they gained about 50 new followers, reaching 4,236. But their sessions increased 17,400 and their traffic continues to grow even with a minimal follower growth. In December, something really remarkable happened. They added just 26 new followers on Pinterest, but their sessions jumped to over 21,000, which is a 25% traffic increase with virtually no change to their follower account. This is such a powerful example that an account with less than 5,000 followers is outperforming an account with over 218,000 followers. Their December December traffic was 2.5 times higher than our second example. This is the takeaway. If you are just starting out on Pinterest and you are only looking at that follower count, you are only looking at even at that monthly viewer number. This should be motivating for you that you do not need a massive follower base to generate significant, significant traffic on Pinterest. What you need is a smart strategy focused on creating the right kind of content that works with Pinterest discovery system. Rather than obsessing over follower numbers. As we've seen throughout these four real world examples, these are actual accounts. The relationship between follower counts and actual traffic on Pinterest is tenuous at best. We've examined examined accounts where traffic nearly doubled while follower growth was minimal. An account with double the followers generated just a fraction of the traffic. An account with the fewest followers of our first three examples drove the highest traffic by far, and a small account with under 5,000 followers outperformed one with over 218,000. The evidence is clear on Pinterest. Follower count is largely a vanity metric that does not translate to meaningful business results. What truly matters is creating content that aligns with how Pinterest works in a visual discovery engine. Focus your energy on developing high quality searchable pins that solve problems and answer questions your target audience is actively seeking. I answered a question the other day from somebody who said, is Pinterest still worth it if you are just starting out? Growth on Pinterest is slow. All the metrics, not just follower count, is going to be moving at a snail's pace. It takes six to nine months of investment to really feel like Pinterest is making a dent for you, but when you evaluate it Next to all all the other social media platforms out there, Pinterest is still an amazing outlier for driving traffic and bringing new readers, new buyers to your website. We often say that Pinterest traffic is cold to you, they don't know you. Whereas Instagram or TikTok, they're warmer, they have seen you, they've engaged with you a couple of times. So as you evaluate moving forward, set your sights on six to nine months and just put that follower count aside and don't pay attention to it. Pay attention to how you're impacting the end user on Pinterest. I'd love to hear about your experiences with Pinterest followers versus traffic. You can drop me a message at helloimpleplepenmedia.com or if you're watching on YouTube you can comment down below. I'd love to hear about your experience as well, but I just want to reassure you that follower account on Pinterest does not matter. It matters how you are creating content to impact the end user. Thanks so much for listening.