← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Kate's Take: Quick thoughts on Pinterest marketing #10 – Breaking down the engineering blog
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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin podcast. This is Kate's take number 10. What I'm going to do is walk you through my process for understanding really deep engineering blog updates that come from Pinterest. So just a few weeks ago, the Pinterest Engineering blog, which if you just Google Pinterest Engineering Blog, you'll find it. It's a very heady kind of article on medium where you can read through what people are doing, building and creating as engineers at Pinterest. So this one was called the Evolution of the Multi Objective Optimization at Pinterest Home Feed. I'll link it for you below. Somebody in my Simple Pin media insiders group, our SPM insiders group, dropped this and said, hey, can you help me understand what changes we should make to our pin designs and pinning strategy based on this article? That question comes from the assumption that when Pinterest releases an update in the engineering blog, it means either something needs to be changed or adjusted or how do we just benchmark whether or not we are on the right track? That's a good question to ask. It's always important to make sure that you're in alignment, right? Well, the problem is is that it's really hard to read like so my first line is to put it into Claude or whatever AI tool you use and I basically ask it to give me any takeaways from the article. Now that's not a good prompt because the takeaways that it gave me were very, very engineering, like so. So I asked it to explain it to me like as if I was Talking to my 75 year old mother and I wanted to help explain it in a way where they would understand in plain language. So I thought I would share that with you because I think that it gives a better understanding of where Pinterest is at and it's written in such a good way that you can kind of put some action items behind it. So this article, I want you to think about it as they are writing about the Pinterest home feedback, not think about it, they actually are doing that. So think of Pinterest Home Feed like a TV channel. Pinterest job is to keep people watching not just for five minutes today, but coming back tomorrow, next week, next month. So they've spent years building a system that figures out the best mix of content to show each person. That's essentially what we have called the Smart feed. So here's what they've learned and they've changed based on what they've written up in this article, variety keeps people watching. Repetition drives them away. Okay, think about that. That's the same for you. If you open up your Netflix feed and you see the same five series that keep popping up, or ones that maybe you've clicked on before, you're going to get bored with it. So the engineers at Pinterest actually tested this when they showed people more of the same type of content, even stuff the person seemed to like. Engagement went up for for one day and then tanked. People got bored and left. So Pinterest now actively mixes things up in your feed on purpose, even if you've been saving a lot of one particular thing. So think of it like you saved a bunch of flowers for an event coming up. Well, maybe you're also interested in cooking or interested in fashion. They don't want it to be the same. So what this means for you as a marketer is that if you're posting a lot of pins that look nearly identical. So same image, style, same topic, same colors, Pinterest is going to spread them way out or stop showing them all together. Not because they're bad, but because showing 10 of the same thing in a row is bad for the viewer. Pinterest also got a lot smarter about what similar means. It used to mostly go by topic category, like home decor or recipes. Now it looks at the actual image, the words in your description, and the topic all at the same time. So you can't just change the caption and call it a different pin if it looks the same. Pinterest knows new pins now get evaluated almost instantly. In the past, a brand new pin might take a while to get understood by Pinterest. Now it's nearly immediate. The good news is that if you're posting fresh, varied content, this will be rewarded. But it also means low quality or repetitive pins gets flagged just as fast. Borderline content doesn't just get removed anymore, it gets quietly pushed down. If a pin doesn't fully meet Pinterest quality standards, instead of just deleting it, they now space it way out in the feeds. So it rarely shows up. Still there, but it's basically invisible. So the big takeaway for you is that Pinterest is rewarding accounts that post a good variety of content consistently over time, not flooding the platform with 50 nearly identical pins. Think of it like setting a dinner table. You want a mix of things, not the same dish in every single spot. Okay, this is a little bit more than five minutes and a little bit deeper than what I normally do in Kate's take. But what I want you to take away from this is just be thinking of variety. If you've been changing up your pins by adding animation or adding a line that's just not going to cut it anymore, think about creating content that for the people on Pinterest is varied. It can go to the same place, but it looks different so that Pinterest might show it to different people. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening. If you've never left a review on Apple Podcasts, we'd love for you to hit the five star and then give us a little bit of feedback. We'd love to hear from you.