← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Most common questions asked about Pinterest Marketing
00:28:04
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- [00:00]
Kate All
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pen Podcast. I am your host, Kate all. And if you are watching on YouTube, hello, welcome. And if you are listening in the podcast app, hello and welcome. One of the things that Simple Pen Media that we love is questions from our audience and the reason we love them is because it gives us an idea of what people are struggling with, the things that they are working through. So in today's episode, I am going to be diving deep into not only our most frequently asked questions, but questions that people have submitted recently on Instagram or other platforms. Our door is always open, so if you have a question, just email us helloimplepin media.com before we dive in, I do want to talk quickly about Simple Pen Media and who we are. First and foremost, we are a Pinterest marketing agency and we have this education media arm where we help people really get better at their Pinterest so that they can grow their business and eventually hire us. If you are a business owner and you have the extra money in your budget right now to hire out your Pinterest marketing, we have space open and available right now. All you have to do is book a discovery call with our team. During that discovery call, what we do is we figure out what is your brand about, is a good match for Pinterest, where your, where's your whole marketing just in general at and how can we fit into that to be able to take Pinterest marketing off your plate so you can focus on other areas of your business. This can be both organic or paid ads. Simply go to simplepennedia.comservices to book your discovery call. Now you're listening to the Simple Pen podcast, Pinterest for business advice that goes down smooth and easy. Here's your host, Kate All. Okay, so what I'm going to do for this episode today is I'm just going to go line by line through the questions. There is no particular order as to how these questions are laid out. I'm just going to go through them one at a time. The thing I want to tell you is that Pinterest marketing, just like any marketing on any social media platform, doesn't always have a clear cut answer. I wish I could give you one. In some areas. I wish there could be this hard and fast rule. I've always wanted that. Over the years that I've been doing Pinterest marketing here for over 10 years, there have been times when people asked me, okay, what percentage of growth am I going to get with Pinterest over The next six months, one year, two years, three years. And that is so subjective as to what your niche is. And I feel like that answer is consistent for all the platforms out there. But for Pinterest, it seems more difficult to figure out how to give a direct answer. So there will be times where I say it depends, but I'm going to give some qualifications around how it depends and how you can really understand how to frame up, maybe how it works for you within the answer. So the number one question we get, we'll start with that. How many pins per day should I pin to Pinterest? So when you are marketing on Pinterest, you distribute your pins widely on the platform. And we talk a lot about doing this daily pinning every day to the platform. The reason for this is because Pinterest has told us they like consistency coming from creators or shop owners adding value to the platform. Because if you think about it this way, the people who use Pinterest, the Pinner, they are scrolling on their app, they're saving things, they're finding things, they're operating within the platform, right? And so you, as a business, if you're adding new content to that whole pool, it allows the amount of content that the Pinner gets to choose from to grow more and more and more. So Pinterest is telling its business users, more content, we love it. The more the better. Now, that doesn't mean 100, 200, 300 times per day. But what that means is as you create new content for your shop or for your content site, your blog, we want you to share that to Pinterest. So when it comes to how many pins per day, that is subjective to how much you create. Create, let's say example A is a content creator who's creating one new blog post per week or one new video per week, they can easily sustain creating a couple different images for that blog post or video. And they can pin that once this week, once next week, as long as it fits on the boards that you have. This can get very crazy. Type A people tend to be like, I need a diagram. I'm not going to go that deep into it right now. But I'm going to say if you're creating content consistently, you can keep fueling your pins per day. Let's say that you're not creating content anymore. Maybe you have this huge backlog of content. You have articles for your shop, you have articles for your blog, and you really just are tired, right? You can, you can still pin a lot per day, but you're not Going to see the kind of growth that you would get if you were creating new content. So how does this answer the number of pins per day? What it, what it does is you want to be adding something to the platform that's new. You can add old stuff too, but I would say anywhere between one to ten pins a day, depending on how much content you have. So this is one of those? It depends. Answer. I'll share my story. I have almost 400 podcasts which are turned into blog posts. We also have videos here on YouTube. What we do is we create two images for each of those. So we pin anywhere between seven and ten pins per day. Because we have new content as well as old content. Sometimes we go back to the old content and we do an image refresh. We can pin it again. I don't hold to just keeping it the cap at 10. We've tried 25, we've tried 30. We haven't really noticed a difference. Our sweet spot is really between 5 and 7. What I recommend for you is just picking a starting point. Start somewhere and see how it works. See how it feels. See if you're overwhelmed or not. That is a huge thing as well. I know for me, if somebody tells me to do a lot of pins per day, I tend to shut down. I'm not going to do any more than that. So it depends on how much content you create. The next is what scheduling tool is best to use. So there are several out there. And what I recommend, number one, is that it's one that works with your brain. Let me back up. You use a scheduling tool on Pinterest to fulfill what I just talked about just a second ago. You want to stay consistent and sometimes you're going to be pinning a lot of pins per day. I'm not going to be opening up the app and looking at pinning five to seven per day. So we have a few options to choose from to make sure that the content is consistently going onto Pinterest. One, we have Pinterest itself. It has its own native scheduling tool. I personally don't love it, but some people like it because it's free. So it's very budget friendly and you can schedule out up to 30p or 30 days in advance. We prefer Tailwind. It's one that we've used forever. However, we have also used Planoly for some of our clients. There's pin generator that's out there. Buffer. I just heard somebody the other day say that they loved Canva. When we tried Canva, we did not like it, but they liked it because of the efficiency. It was their favorite. So look out there to see what options are out there and pick one that works best with your productivity and works best with your brain. Okay?
- [08:20]
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- [09:03]
Kate All
Hashtags Hashtags are a no on Pinterest There have been these little blips in the past where Pinterest has said yes, use hashtags and blips where the hashtags highlight. But Pinterest is a search and discovery platform, which means that the keywords really drive what it is the algorithm shows to people when they search it. So when you add in a hashtag it kind of breaks up that keyword path. So you want to avoid using hashtags. Even if you hear somebody come out and say, oh my gosh, I saw this on Pinterest. They sent out this email to a new user and it had something about hashtags. Don't worry about it. It's definitely not something you want to pay attention to. Not a big deal. And then other people ask a follow up question. Should I go back and remove hashtags from old posts? I wouldn't. I wouldn't worry about it. If you're in there and you see it and you want to edit it, go for it. But don't make it like a big daily activity. Okay, I understand that I'm not supposed to use hashtags. This is a question, but are those different than the tags section I see? In the Pinterest native scheduling tool there are, there's something called tagged topics. You always want to use tagged topics, so you always want to use any opportunity Pinterest gives you to add keywords. So if you see an ability to add a pin title, pin description, tag topics, board title, board description, complete it. The more context you can give Pinterest about your pin, the better. All right, next question. Does the board description also need natural sounding Language or can it be a list? You can certainly do a list, but here's where I take it, is that the more and more these search algorithms try to get better and better, what they're trying to avoid now especially is avoiding something that's either AI sounding or in the past it was keyword stuffing. So the more you can have something sound natural, the better. So when a board, when you create a board, you create a board title and a board description. The board description supports the board title meaning it gives it more like keyword support. Although I have actually seen some boards pop up in my Google results that didn't have a description. So who knows, sometimes it can get picked up in Google. But to play it safe, have it be natural sounding languages, language. Okay, when we update older posts with new pins, do the original pins stay in the feed on our boards? Okay, let me give some context to this. When this person is asking when we update older posts with new pins, do the original pins stay in our feeds? Okay, let's say I have a blog post and it is two years old and I want to do a refresh on the images. So I go back to the blog post, I refresh the images, or maybe I go to a product listing, I refresh the images, but I've already pinned those images to Pinterest. They are out there. It's safe to say once you pin a pin to Pinterest, it is out in the ecosystem. The only time that a pin might potentially be removed or changed is if you have a product pin. If your product catalog is connected to Pinterest, what that allows it to do is update images and update pricing and update inventory. That's the reason it was created. It's pretty awesome. But if you have just a standard pin, then it will be out there forever. You can't really do anything about it. It will be on your board too. But it's okay. Just leave it alone. Let it ride. I actually have a really old pin that before when you couldn't find a PIN image to pin, if you're a regular Pinner, Pinterest would pull these blocks of color with just a title on it. Somebody pinned one like that. It was how to clean up Pinterest boards. And it's pink. It's just a pink square block. It is still getting a lot of saves and driving a lot of traffic to my website. I'm not going to worry about it. Next question, can we change the URL for links on old pins that aren't accurate anymore? This goes back to the last question, if other people have pinned your pins and they are out there, you cannot do anything about it. But you can change the link on your pin. But even if you change the link on your pin, it doesn't change the rest of them on the platform. If you do something like a URL change or a rebrand, if you set up a redirect, all of those pins will automatically redirect to your new site. So it's a bummer that that old URL is out there, but you really can't change it with the exception of just a few pins that are on your boards. Here's a great question. I love this. Should services market on Pinterest differently than products? 100% they should. Here's why. When you are marketing a service to someone, you are asking them to participate in something with you. So let's think of it maybe as a therapy session versus a therapy blanket. So therapy blanket is. I mean, that's not a good. I don't think it's called a therapy blanket. Weighted blanket. That's what it is. Weighted blanket versus a therapy session. Or coaching. Or you could even take the example of you might be doing weightlifting. Coaching versus selling the actual barbells. Right. Somebody who is marketing a service, let's take weightlifting. If you are trying to market to people who are looking to do how to do something, you want to angle it as to it's the how and the why. That's the question that they're asking. It may be a beginner at something that you provide and so you want to be marketing at that original question. Whereas somebody is going to be asking what for the actual product? What is the best barbell set to buy? What is the best gym equipment brand? So you see how those are two are very different. So you always want to take a look at what the end user is searching. What is the pinner searching to get to your services? It might be why do we need to start weightlifting? How do I start weightlifting? Those are very different things than what do I start weightlifting with. So you absolutely need to market services different than products. Any tips for naming boards or writing board descriptions? Yep. It's using these two tools. One, the search bar on Pinterest. Simply search what you think you want to name your board. This also closely aligns with what you're going to be talking about or what your products are. And then use the Trends tool. Go over to trends.pinterest.com and search to see when a particular topic is trending. Or maybe look at the Top boards. Get some ideas from both of those places. Pick a name and then write your description. Are you stuck with that name forever? Absolutely not. You can for sure change it up in the future if you find that you want to refine that name even more. Alrighty, next questions. How do we know if our pins are working? Being seen, getting traffic and attention. The number one way that you can get data about your performance on Pinterest is analytics. If you have a business account on Pinterest, you simply get analytics by looking in your account. You could see in the upper left, there will be a place for analytics. Look at it. You can see impressions, you can see saves, outbound clicks, closeups. You can get a lot of data if it's working or not. And then if you have another analytics tool, you can check, like on your website, whether it's through Shopify or another type of product platform, or you can look at G4. You can see if there's any traffic coming from Pinterest. You can also use something like Microsoft Clarity to see if there's anybody landing on your website that's going to give you some idea of whether or not your pins are actually working for you, if they're getting the traction that you want. All righty, let's see. Creating images. I love this. Okay, they say my visual style is bright, graphic, high contrast, maybe Gen X, which seems really different than a lot of what I see on Pinterest, which is muted colors, minimal. Millennial. Am I better off sticking to my style to stand out or adapt so my images look like they belong? There's two parts to this. Number one, I would say you're better off sticking to your branding and your style for one reason alone. This creates branding, this creates awareness, and it begins to show people who you are and what you do simply by your branding, standing out. If you are targeting Gen X, if you are targeting a different market, you absolutely don't want to blend in with Millennial, because that is not you. So here's a great example that I've used a few times before on this podcast. Teachers Pay Teachers is an a site where teachers can sell products for teachers. So teachers paying teachers. And what we see on Pinterest is that when they put their products onto Pinterest, the images are very busy. It has similar font, it has similar look, right? But if you stand out a little bit and you do less images, you pull back from the product and you look a little bit different, you might stand out in the sea of teachers pay teachers products. It might be Something where yours looks a little bit different. The number one way that you can see how your images are doing is you're going to test new images for three months. And when you test those new images, then go back into analytics and look to see which type of images got the most engagement. Were their faces on the images? Was there my new colors on the images? What was a. What really stood out about those that I want to take into the next six months to rinse and repeat. I'm a big fan of keeping your branding very forward and then doing things that really attract your user and then standing out from the rest. So get bold with your images. Really remember that they are the billboard advertising of your Pinterest account. They are the thing that people look at first and decide if they want to click or not. All right, here's a few last ones that we're going to go through. How to optimize PIN titles for action takers to increase clicks. There's two things that I want to draw out about this. PIN titles are what you'll see on the kind of the format of when you upload a pin, you can add a PIN title. The PIN title there is really for the algorithm that is a simple like 4, 5, 6 words that is kind of like a buzzy statement for the actual algorithm. Then there is the PIN text that is on the image. I'm assuming that this person is asking about that. So the text that you put on the image will definitely be something that people read right away. So I always tell people, like, think about what you would want to read. Think about what would capture you. Think about what would give this image context. You can do it. We call it PIN copy. What is the PIN copy that's going to go on the image that's going to get people curious and then you can do a sub call to action. PIN copy call to action. Where you can say, get the guide, learn more, find out more about this collection. Something along those lines. But get creative with really buzzy four word phrases that you can use for your PIN copy. This is a great one. Is Pinterest worthwhile for a local photographer? I've seen two cases. If you are a local photographer, let's say you're doing senior pictures or you're doing weddings, right? There is a lot that can be shared on Instagram and people share that back and forth. But don't forget that people go to Pinterest to search a location. If you are especially a destination photographer, obviously I would use Pinterest. If you are also Somebody who is trying to get a certain local locality. So if you are Portland, Oregon senior pictures, a lot of what you do on Pinterest can support what's being done on Google. So people are searching on Google. They might also get this Pinterest board to or a Pinterest pin to pull up. If you really don't see a market for something like senior pictures or weddings or something like that, then it might not be worth your time. But I would recommend you at least build your profile on Pinterest. You have a board where it is. I live in Portland. That's why I did Portland, Oregon, Portland, Oregon weddings. And on that board is all the weddings that you have or you say Portland, Oregon photography locations. You have at least five boards that I can see and I can. It can showcase who you are, like your photography style. People also search poses. People also search engagement photography. There's a lot of different things. If you do anything, at least get your profile set up on Pinterest. All right, this is a good one. And I have felt this before. I think it's lecc. I'm confused on what tagging a product does on a pin versus direct only a link to buy. Okay, there's two ways that you can take a product. You can tag a product as an affiliate or you can tag a product as a particular shop product that you have. Let's say that you have taken an image of a kitchen and it has this like really incredible Dutch oven in it. Yeah, I wouldn't say like you can tag that product as the Dutch oven and people can go click on it. But people are much more likely to buy if they come to the blog post and they see all that you have. So I would use it less if it's something that you're going to be doing an affiliate. And I would maybe use it more on your lifestyle photography if it is your own product, like if that is your Dutch oven, tag it right. But if it's something where you need to warm them up, like an affiliate marketing piece, I would not do direct only link to buy, which is, you know, something that you asked here. I would go to the blog post instead of tagging the product. I don't even like the direct only link to buy. We see very little conversions happening on the direct link only. So if you don't have a website, then that's a little bit different. But I don't think this is the case here. But tagging a product really just allows you, I would say first and foremost to tag your own products. I would leave it for mostly just that. How often should you pin your most popular pin? I like to pin mine once a month because I know it's my most popular and I like to play around with the different images. Sometimes we'll even go, we've gone longer than that. I think we've also gone three to four months in between. But I know it's my most popular pen, so I want to play around with different looks for that particular image. I might even want to change up what the pin copy is. So you could do it once a month. Once every three months. That's kind of a wide gap there. But if you want to pick a starting point, just pick a starting point. I find for me that my top pens don't tend to fall out of the top 10. If they do, I go look at Pinterest and see if somebody has outranked me. Okay, that's it. That was kind of a hodgepodge of questions when it comes to Pinterest marketing. I will leave you with this. If you are new to Pinterest marketing and a lot of what I have just said is like you said, board descriptions, you said taking a pin, hashtags, natural sounding language, scheduling tools. I feel overwhelmed. Don't feel overwhelmed. We have a way to walk you through getting your Pinterest set up. You can go to simplepenn media.com start that's just gonna walk you through the first four steps. That's gonna at least get you to that point where you have your profile set up. You generally get it. You have an idea of this whole Pinterest thing. Now if there are pieces and parts you wanna go deeper on. So let's say you're really trying to go deep on images, we can help you with that either by creating images for you or we have an images workshop in our shop. If you're on YouTube, you can just click down below and see the link for that in the description. Last, the reason I use Pinterest is because I, I believe and I see that it is so different than all the rest. It is a compliment to what I'm doing on Instagram or TikTok. It is a compliment to what I am doing. Even with Google and with email. It's a very supportive search and discovery traffic that really just keeps driving traffic all year, all the time. I'm really a huge fan of Pinterest for that reason. So if you need any help at all, Simple Pen Media is here for you. Last, if you have been listening to this podcast for a while would you take just 30 seconds and hit the five star button on Apple? You can even leave a review. We read all of those. Thank you or five stars on Spotify. If you are here on YouTube, make sure you subscribe to this channel. We do not only this podcast here, but we also do educational videos here and you can find that just YouTube.com and then look at simple Pin media. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening.