Kate All (0:11)

You're listening to the Simple Pen Podcast, Pinterest for business advice that goes down smooth and easy. Here's your host, Kate All. Welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin Podcast. If you are listening in your podcast app, just know that you can watch this episode on YouTube. If you're on YouTube. Yes, I am in my she shed here. If you are new to the podcast. In 2016, I converted our garden shed to my office. It's called the she Shed. It's a really small little building. I have couch back there, my YouTube recording stuff, and I have a walking pad in here, a standup desk, a heater, an air conditioner. It's really the most magical little. But it is cold. I am from the Pacific Northwest. I live in Portland, Oregon, and even though it is sunny outside right now, it's freezing. So yes, I am wearing a scarf and a cap here while I record this. So today we are going to be talking about the Pinterest algorithm and what we know about it, what we don't know about it. So I want to dive deep into that, plus share with you an article that Shopify did about understanding that Pinterest algorithm that I thought was like really super helpful. I'm going to link that below in the description so you can go read it for yourself. But we run weekly education for our team. It is really important to me and has been important to me the whole time I have owned my agency that anybody who works for me needs to be just as educated, if not more than me. So we have someone on our team who specifically does Pinterest education. And what that means is that every single Monday, our team gets an internal document with all the latest links about Pinterest, as well as highlighting something that our team needs to learn a little bit more about. We have been doing this since 2017. So you can imagine our Google Drive is filled with thousands of weekly education notes because we believe as an agency, we need to keep Pinterest top of mind. We need to be sharp, we need to be educated in order to serve our clients as well as teach you here on YouTube and on the podcast. So if you're interested in working with our team, you can simply go down below and click on simplepinmedia.com services to figure out a way that we can work for you and take all the education, all the knowledge that we have, and apply that to your business. So one of these education reports was understanding the Pinterest algorithm. I think it's so important for everybody to understand we will never, ever Ever know the full extent of any algorithm on any platform that is out. In fact, if you didn't know what this whole TikTok thing is about, it's about the algorithm and it's about the fact that the main company does not want to sell this algorithm to be known by any other company. It's very secretive. So companies will move mountains to keep their algorithms secret. But we can also, we can all not also, we can all get an idea of what the algorithm is based on our experiences, based on our learnings from other people. People. And the highest level I can explain the Pinterest algorithm is like this. And then we're going to go into a deeper into this article so you can understand it even more so so that you can frame up your marketing in a way that really helps you target people in the algorithm. So I first and foremost, I call Pinterest this, they call themselves this, everybody else does. It's a search and discovery platform. So that means it is not a social algorithm is not dependent on engagement per se. It's more dependent on what people are interested and what they're searching for. So there's two ways that Pinterest will try to get in front of Pinners. That's what they call pinners so that they are served up exactly what they are searching for. So I have used this name before, something I came up with a long time ago. Susie. She's our regular pinner. When Susie opens up her app, what she sees first is called a smart feed. This smart feed is comprised of anything she's ever searched, her boards. They take into consideration what she has created in her boards, what she's saving and then who she follows and what they think she might be interested in the future. So say Susie has just searched for a flower birthday party for her teen daughter. The next time she opens up the app, she's going to get served up with a little bit of information about flower birthday parties for her teen daughter. But we also know that she searched for recipes in the past and fashion, and so that will be infused in there as well alongside ads that Pinterest wants to show her. Pinterest ads are what they call native to the platform. They kind of integrate in really easily to where you don't always know if it's an ad or not an ad. Once you become a seasoned marketer, you can spot it really quickly when it says promoted by. But for the most part, if you're just looking at the image, it's hard to tell because they're the same Size as every other image on there or they're a video. So they just kind of infused into the platform. So the goal is that Susie looks at her home feed, her smart feed, and she's like, this is awesome. Like, okay, I'm going to click on this, I'm going to save this, I'm going to keep scrolling. And she goes down a rabbit hole for whatever she's interested in. Then there is a second place and that's called the search feed. So now if Susie opens up the app and she's like, well, I think I'm going to search today for travel trips to the Grand Cayman. So she searches for that and what she gets is what's called the search feed, exactly what she searched around. Travel tips to the Grand Cayman. Pinterest wants to show basically the best, most well saved and clicked on pins that exist on the platform. Search feeds don't change, meaning I will search travel chips for the Grand Cayman, Susie will search and somebody else will search. We'll all get the same thing. But our home feeds are all different. They are unique to us. In fact, there's a setting inside of your settings in Pinterest that's called Tune Home Feed. This is actually a user tool because they want Pinterest, they want pinners to be able to tune their home feed based on things that are happening. In fact, it really came about with some sensitivity. Maybe if a woman was pregnant and she had a miscarriage, she really didn't want to see anything about baby anymore. Or maybe she was searching for weddings like crazy and she's planned her wedding and she has moved on, she doesn't want to see anything more about weddings. This allows her to tune her home feed so that she is not getting anything she's no longer interested in. I have actually used this before when I did a big trip a while back about Portugal and I really didn't want anything about Portugal anymore. I wasn't. I love Portugal. I want to go back a hundred times over. But I'm not in my first trip kind of planning phase. And so you can say, don't show me anything more about Portugal. It's a really helpful tool. So the algorithm is taking a look at a few different things in order to populate both the home feed and the search feed. So that's where we get into Shopify's article. So let's talk a little bit about that. Number one is domain quality. So Pinterest evaluates the reliability of a website linked to each pin. Consistent clicks and low bounce rate. Signals high quality content increasing your website's visibility on the platform. Pins that lead to broken links will not get traction and they may actually be penalized. So here's what this means is that if you are actually giving somebody really great tips, they come to your website and they stick around for a little while. More of the same habit is really, really good. But more of this click there and then bounce really fast. That is not good. Now you should always know that Pinterest users, they are bouncy, they really frame up if they want something really super fast. So sometimes there's not a lot of control that you have over domain quality. But it's really important for you to Pay attention to 404 links coming to your website and paying attention to your pins going to the right place in order order to increase engagement. If somebody sees a pin on Pinterest and they come to your website, they want to know, oh, you have the answer for me, or at least the beginning of an answer. I want to learn more about your product. I want to read more of the article. This is a big reason why I'm pretty bullish on keeping rich pins on. Rich pins are a feature on Pinterest where you could add some metadata that allows Pinterest to know that this is your pin, it's your website and it gives sometimes ingredients, it gives product information, it gives a lot of good information for the pinner to see before they click, allowing them to be qualified before they get to your website. This increases the chance that they're going to stick around. If you want to know about rich pins, I will link below in the show notes. I wasn't planning on talking about them, so I'm going to make myself a note right now to link in this document because I always forget. It's classic, right? I will be recording an episode and I'm like oh my gosh, so great and then forget to put the link. But I will link to that rich pins post so you can learn more about it. And number two is pin quality. So Pinners evaluate the quality of each PIN based on its engagement. Like saves, likes and comments, which I'm going to put in brackets right there. I don't think those are as important. And they say shares. Now I disagree with Shopify a lot little bit on this where likes, comments and shares, yes, they're important but I think saves is number one and then I think clicks is probably number two. So these engagement metrics that they're talking about, I think you don't have to work super hard to get that. Because if you have a bunch of saves and you're coming up high in the search feed, people will naturally comment. And I share pins with friends all the time. And so these things kind of just naturally happen. I don't think there's a whole lot you can do to get that, but you can create really awesome pins that people want to save and that people want to click on. How do you do that? The biggest way that you do that is by making sure that your pin really illustrates what it is people are getting on the other side of the click. It piques their curiosity. It hits them right where they are at. So pin quality matters. Number three is Pinner activity. Accounts must consistently pin engaging content and interact with their audience to maintain visibility. Key word There is consistency. So simply posting pins without engagement can result in lower rankings. Active participation such as commenting, replying and saving content helps boost your Pinner quality and reach. Okay, I again have a little bit of debate on this, but it's definitely something worth testing. We've tried it a couple of times on our accounts, but basically what they're saying is that if you are an active participant on the platform, you are actively adding pins to the platform. That is a good thing. But if you're also saving other people's stuff, then that can also be a sign of good Pinner activity. So I would say commenting on other people's pins, replying, that's going to come with the people who are already commenting on your stuff. I don't think you have to go out and comment on other people's things. I think you have to do your due diligence and comment to the people who are commenting to you. So somebody has an authentic comment which on Pinterest there's a little bit of spam comments and then there's also some really good authentic comments. Let's say you have a recipe and people are maybe commenting that it was working or it was not working. Comment back to them and engage with them. This shows that you are also an active contributor to the platform. You're not just throwing yourself your stuff up there and being like, well, I hope it works, but you're actually engaging on the platform topic. Relevance was on their list is number four. It says Pinterest analyzes keywords, titles, descriptions and even images or videos to determine content relevance. Pin that aligns close Pins that align closely with the user's search boards and recent activity are more likely to appear in their feed or search results. Improve your relevance by using audience focused keywords. Clear Descriptions and titles and eye catching images. Okay, I feel like this is a no brainer, but I want to break it down a little bit. So the Pinterest algorithm is taking into consideration all that you do. So that will be your board names, your board descriptions, your PIN title, your pin descriptions, and it's putting them all together to figure out who you are and what you do. It's also using the visual search tool to look at your images to make sure it closely aligns with what it is you're talking about. So all of this comes together so that when somebody searches for your particular topic, Pinterest is able to source all of the content they have on the platform and serve it up to this person who's interested. It's like if nobody had any of this filled out, Pinterest would be kind of flying blind and they'd be going, well, I don't, I don't really know. This works or this works works. They want their home feed to be so smart and intelligent for the people that use their platform that they want to keep them around even longer. If people open up their Pinterest app and their home feed doesn't make sense, then they're going to be confused. In fact, I've shared this story, I believe I've shared it on here, but my husband is not a social media guy, like at all. He hates it. But he thought because the YouTube algorithm wasn't showing him what he wanted, he would see what was on Instagram. Well, he signed up for an account and the first stuff was not even in his home language. It was not even really relevant to him at all, even with the, the data that he had given them. Signing up for an account and within two seconds he was like, done, I'm out. I'll deal with YouTube and I'll figure out a way to train the algorithm. So it's important that your topics and your keywords and your board names and all of that goes together to align with who you are and what you do. Number five is rich pins. And I have touched on this. It is an important part of the algorithm. I'm going to link below to our rich pin article. It's constantly updated with all the information that you need, but these pins automatically sync all of that information. So number four, making sure you have all that information in there, it kind of gets pulled over automatically. It's a really good way to combat stolen pins. It's a really good way to prevent anybody from taking your content. It's all connected to you. So those of you who are like, why is this a big deal? Like, just have the rich pins turned on. In the food creator community, this is a pretty big one because they don't want to have ingredients on the pin because they want people to click. My encouragement to those who are wanting to test that out is you can test it by turning it off and turning it on, but I would highly recommend you leave it on so that you can get more qualified traffic to stick around longer on your website. It's a really, really helpful tool and it contributes to search. Okay. I hope this enlightens you a little bit more about what the Pinterest algorithm is and that you're really able to understand how to leverage it in order order to grow your business. If you are choosing to use Pinterest for your marketing in 2025, you have to understand how it works. You can't overlay your idea of Instagram and just say, well, here's what I know about Instagram and TikTok. Let's hope it works on Pinterest. That's just not the way to do it. Pinterest is a search and discovery. It is very interested in making sure pinners who open up their app have exactly what they want and they depend on you, the creator, in order to bring them great content to serve them up in their home feed. Alrighty. What have you learned about the Pinterest algorithm? What have you heard over the years? I would love to hear from you. The best place that you can do that is over on YouTube. We have a lot of active commenters over there on our podcast videos. It's really great. I go in there every single day. I comment back. We are not actively using Instagram right now, so it'll be a little tough for you. You can DM us over there. Somebody does check it every once in a while. But for great conversation, join us on YouTube. Go to YouTube.comsimplepin media all righty. Thanks so much for listening.