← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Website Visits and Pinterest Shares To Optimize User Experience
01:03:35
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- [00:00]
A
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin podcast. I just want to tell you right now that this is a long podcast, but it is filled with not only great information about how to re engage your website user, ways that you can leverage the Hubbub plugin for your Pinterest shares, but also Pinterest engagement. There's just so much. So before you dive in, I want to tell you that this is not sponsored by Hubbub. Right. I was actually recording it and about, I don't know, 20 minutes in, I thought people are going to think this is sponsored. It is not. I have been a longtime user of Hubbub, as you will hear in its previous iterations and that rolled over into Hubbub. I have known Andrew at NerdPress for years as well. He is a great colleague in this industry and I love how he serves his community and how he helps to create tools. And you brought in Colin and who is now the manager of Hubbub and I would say the creative engineer of this plugin to create something that's really great for publishers. So if you do not have a WordPress site, this might not apply to you. So I give you a pass. You could don't have to listen if you don't want to or watch if you're on YouTube, but if you are a WordPress user and maybe you have used social pug, social, social warfare, grow and even Hubbub, but you maybe haven't renewed your license, this would be a great one to listen to to optimize. Now if you're going into this thinking Hubbub is that social share button site, it's so much more than that. And my mind was actually really blown as we got towards the end and we really talked about this way that you can create this amazing pathway of re engagement on your site using what they call action buttons. And also Andrew has a great project when it comes to hover over buttons being customizable that he talks about at the end as well. I have a special discount code for you down below if after you're done listening you want to renew your license or Update Again, there's 25% off Hubbub and that's the link down below in the description. This is a great podcast. Well, actually I'll say for me to record because at the end we also go over the places at which I have a lot of gaps when it comes to using Hubbub to its full potential. And I put myself in the hot seat because one of the things about My website is that it is not a huge priority. We definitely want to make sure that it's usable, it has great information, but all the work that we do is on our clients accounts when it comes to Pinterest. And so we've kind of put simplepin media.com in a little bit of a back seat, but that changes going forward and actually Colin and I already planned to do a session to talk about how to optimize and update the things on my website and I can give him feedback and information about how they can update and optimize their plugins for Pinterest. So stay, stay tuned. Again, there's a discount link below in the description, not sponsored, but very intriguing and has a lot of great information for you. So with that, let's dive into today's episode with Colin and Andrew of Hubbub and Nerdpress. Andrew And Colin from NerdPress, welcome to the Simple Pen podcast. Hello.
- [03:35]
B
Hi. Nice to be here.
- [03:37]
A
It's been a while since I've done an interview where I'm interviewing two people, but I know based on the, you know, us leading up to this, we're gonna have great conversation about the plugin Hubbub. So Colin, I'm gonna toss this to you for somebody who is like, I've never heard of Hubbub. What is it?
- [03:56]
B
It is a WordPress plugin that helps you to grow your website. Whether that's growing your traffic, growing your mailing list, growing your followers on various social networks. It started off a few years ago where it was just the share button. So just the ability for your readers to come to your site, click on a button that would let you share to Facebook or Pinterest the content that you publish. And that's for your readers to do, not necessarily like a publisher tool, but for the readers to do that. And we acquired it about two years ago. NerdPress acquired it about two years ago from Mediavine and we've been adding features ever since. We've been enhancing the existing features to make since then. So many networks have come out right since we acquired it. There's brand new social networks that didn't even exist before. In fact, there's a whole fediverse of them that wasn't even a thing then. We've also added new features for helping people grow their mailing lists like our Save this feature, which adds a form to your blog post where someone can send your blog post to their email address and when they do, they're added to your mailing list so you can mail them later. And that has seen really great conversion rates for people because the reader gets something out of it, the publisher gets something out of it. And it has been a really big success for not just for Hubbub itself, but for everyone that's using it. People love it. And then we just added a new feature called Action Buttons, which is. It's just a button on a website, but you can have it interact with AI models, like translating a website into a different language, or summarizing a site or pulling out key points and putting them somewhere, or, you know, exploring a city, because it's a travel blog. All kinds of really cool ideas. Most of the time, publishers come up with way better ideas than we ever could have conceived for Action Buttons. And then there's some, like, little utility features inside of it. So all of that, there's a lot of things to manage for the publisher. We try to make it a little bit easier. One of those things is called Find and Fix. So you can imagine people have 5, 600 posts on their site or more, and they're trying to keep all their content up to date, and they're trying to keep content up to date for each of those networks. And Pinterest wants images at a certain size, and Facebook wants a title to be a certain length, and all those things. Find and Fix helps people go through all of those 600 or more posts very quickly, make sure that they have that data there, they can update it quickly, and it's a lot faster than the traditional way of doing it. Inside of WordPress, there's a lot more to Hubbub, but that's kind of the broad. The broad stroke of it.
- [06:45]
A
I was like, here, that. That's a ton that it does. So actually. Okay, I'm going to take it back just a little bit. Andrew. When I heard that Nerd Press, your company had bought Hubbub, I was like, that's. It's had some long history and I've used it from even before, you know, like Colin, you brought up that it was mediavine. So talk about the history and then why you decided to buy it.
- [07:08]
C
So, yeah, it was originally called Social Pug. It was written by a developer named Mihaly Iova, and I think he built it in 27, 2016 or 2017. He really started to gain popularity in 2017. And at the time it was a social sharing button plugin, you know, to add all your, like on Facebook pin on Pinterest type buttons on the top of posts. And we had a few clients using it at the time. Social warfare was also a very popular option. You might remember there was a security vulnerability in social warfare that was being exploited really quickly in the wild. I've still never seen anything like it to this day. To the point where we had to like deactivate it on all of our client sites and one of them still got hacked, which we we cleaned up, of course. But when that happened, we created a blog post that was basically a step by step guide of how to migrate from social warfare to social pug, because everyone wanted to get away from social warfare because of the security issues. And it was just Mihaly, it was just him and he was fielding all the support Stu stuff. So we were able to help with that blog post and then we were helping our clients move. So we basically kind of had his back and helped a lot of people transition over. And so he was able to kind of manage the tsunami of people migrating over. And so that kind of put SocialPug on the map. But that wasn't our plugin or anything. We just, you know, it was a good thing to do to help everybody out. And then in 2019, I think it was, Mediavine decided to buy it. So they acquired the plugin from Mihaly and they were building out at the time Trellis and the Grow platform and they renamed socialpug to Grow Social Pro. Their idea was they were going to actually merge that with the Grow platform, the Grow Me platform. So everybody's very confused because we had this plugin called Grow and this platform called Grow and it almost became a running joke that nobody knew what which was which. And mediavine ended up like, long story short, mediavine ended up not merging the two and they decided, you know what, we don't need the plugin anymore. This isn't. We shouldn't be the stewards of this plugin. And so they reached out to us knowing that we had the history with the plugin and they basically were like, you know what? NerdPress would be a really good home for this plugin. And so they reached out to us and said, would you like to take it? And I said yes. And they said, the only condition is you have to rename it.
- [09:32]
A
Okay, because.
- [09:33]
C
And I was like, yes, of course. We don't need, you know, three products with the same name.
- [09:38]
A
So.
- [09:39]
C
So we, we acquired that in late 2024, right? No, 2023. It's time is the year's kind of. Ever since the pandemic, I'm telling you.
- [09:51]
A
Yes.
- [09:52]
C
So yeah, so we, we had, we acquired it and right at the same time, that's when Colin came into my world. We were actually hiring for a different position, which Colin applied for. And long story short, I was like, no, no, no, no, you're not right for that. But I've got this other thing and you are literally the perfect person on the planet for this job.
- [10:12]
A
Yeah. And why'd you name it Hubbub?
- [10:15]
C
So we needed to rename it and we were actually talking with Jenny from Mediavine, who is the. Their vice president of marketing. Marketing. And she, we were kind of brainstorming and she threw out the idea of Hobnob.
- [10:39]
A
Okay, got it.
- [10:40]
C
I like. And so I might be, I might be mixing this up, Jenny. If I am, I apologize. But the name Hobnob came out, was thrown around and it wasn't quite right because I was a little too like quiddy toity, you know. Yeah, oh, my social plugin is better than yours. And but from that, hubbub came out, you know, it was very close and we're like, oh, that's perfect. Because hubbub is like making some noise, right? You're getting more hubbub for your website and it's just kind of catchy and fun and it's really fun to see people misspell it.
- [11:16]
A
I've misspelled it multiple times. Like, is there two Bs? One B.
- [11:21]
C
Sure. Yeah, we bought a few variations of the domains, so.
- [11:26]
A
Good. Very smart of you. Okay, so you're, you're buying this at like 23ish, we'll say. And at the same time, we have the introduction of Chat GPT late 2022 and it feels like it's kind of turned the Internet on its side. And so how is like, Colin, as you're taking this and also in this new position, it's like you're inheriting two developers worth of like the plugin and now you're trying to merge it into where the current landscape is today. How did you kind of process through some of that and maybe what was your, you know, like people use that term, like true north. What's the person that you're kind of always thinking about that's going to be using this plugin? How was taking all that in and reframing it for our current landscape?
- [12:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think we're always reevaluating that because of the speed at which things are changing. And you know, fortunately we have a very large set of users both in the NerdPress for the, like, those that are already clients of NerdPress that also use HUBBUB already so we can talk to them. We've gone to several events every single year that has helped us to. We learn more than we give there most of the time. I mean, we're definitely there to try to help people understand the capabilities of the software and answer questions like you just asked me, like, what's next? Things like that. We try, but we're learning while we're there. We're seeing how people are using things, what challenges are they facing, those sorts of things. So I think that has been invaluable of actually getting out and talking to those that, that use it every day. And then, you know, at the end of the day, when you're a product manager, though, you kind of have to. Even if someone doesn't know they need something, you have to anticipate that and try to meet that goal. And Action Buttons was kind of that way. There was a few pieces of prior art out there that like, you know, look like what Action Buttons are. But we kind of sat back a little bit and waited to see how that shook out. We actually, I would say, probably could have came out with Action Buttons several months earlier. And I'm glad that we didn't, because I think we were able to see what, what are people's taste for what AI is like. I think you have two minds in our. In our customer set, you have almost two minds on AI currently, which is one that it's ruining everything and one that it's enabling everything. So we had to try to find a feature set that would balance that while not sabotaging current business, but enabling new business. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a delicate thing that we have to always be warning against, where most of our customers will always think we're later than they would like us to be, but we're trying our best to do it in an intentional way. And that also somehow balances nerd presses, corporations, core values, because we would not want to put something out into the world that would go against those. Even if it were a profitable idea, we still wouldn't do it because we're, we're principled in that way. And so there's all this stuff always waring for that attention. And I can tell you right now, because of, because of the speed of AI too, we could be shipping features literally every single day. And that's awesome and terrible because we could easily be shipping stuff that we wish we didn't, you know, weeks later or something. So it is a challenge. It's always been a challenge in software and it doesn't seem like it's going to go away. It might only get worse as far as that, that kind of pull and push thing. But so far it seems like we're doing an okay job because we're finding new customers, we're finding that customers are sticking around. Actually, our retention rate is increasing. We have, we have a few tiers for Hubbub. It's existed for a long time, so as you might imagine, it's been sold a variety of ways for a variety of price points over the years. And the retention of our customers that are purchasing the newest features is higher than those that purchased it many years ago.
- [15:40]
A
Which is a sign of the times, right? Like, as you develop something new, people are like, ready to adapt to it. Which I'd love for you to clarify, actually, before we continue to talk about that, when you say action buttons, like, what do you mean by that? And I'm assuming there's some people who are listening who are like, I've never heard of Hubbub. I don't even know action buttons. And I think I have a couple social share buttons on my site, which is commonly what people. In fact, somebody asked me the other day in our insiders group, she was like, what is this button that someone has here where they can share? And I was like, oh, these are, these are share buttons and you install them. They just assumed it came with like the whole website. It was just a package. So clarify for those listening, like action buttons. What do you mean by that?
- [16:26]
B
Okay, so an action button in our world is just a feature that we created. It's not like an industry standard by any means or anything like that. So you're not missing out on an industry term, really. We're kind of coining it for ourselves these, these action buttons. But you could imagine, like you have a call to action button on the top of your podcast page that says, hey, if you'd like some consultation, click here to learn more. It's a call to action. That's a call to action button. So kind of where we got the name. There's also on a food recipe blog, you might have a jump to the recipe button. On another website, you might have click here to contact us, whatever the action is that you're asking the person to do. We've created buttons that enable a lot of different things in that for those kinds of buttons. But we went one step further, which is we allow you to create a custom prompt which is just like a sentence or two that you would send to a chat. GTP Chat GPT type service or Gemini or Cloud or Perplexity and say do something with what the page I'm looking at. So if I'm looking at a travel blog, I could have a button that says find me cheap flights to this destination. I could have a button that says translate this into Spanish. I could have a button that would say and we've done and we've seen these in the wild. Take all of the ingredients that are on this recipe for this recipe and based on grocers in my area, give me a shopping list and tell me what aisles that they're in and it does that for you. So it goes, it goes beyond like just jumping to a recipe or maybe clicking to email someone. This is now getting to the point where it can interact with the content that's on the page. So we came up with action buttons. We're, we're slowly enhancing them as we go again intentionally because we want it to be value add to the publisher. One thing that it is a value add to the publisher is that by doing these prompts you can, this is an option. You don't have to do this. You can ask Chat GPT to remember your website for that person for later. So you could say, hey, if I have collins cool burgers.com I just came up with that now. I hope it's not taken. And I would like that person every time that they search or they ask ChatGPT in the future food related questions. I want my site to be one that it recommends and you can do that. So that way rather than these LLMs stealing traffic from these blogs, they're now returning traffic to these blogs because of the use of action buttons.
- [19:22]
A
Okay, so I get what you're saying too about like not going too fast because you're right, things are changing at the speed of light. And then also trying to balance with what your users and your customers are looking for and giving them an element of choice. Like if I want to lean in super hard to I can. If I want to stay really just below it, I guess I would ask Andrew, like what do you feel like you've seen as far as like either adoption or user or people being open to. Yeah, I want to add that button. I want that my stuff to be always. I want my Collins Cool burgers to always be recommended. I guess. Tell me a little bit about the conversations that you're having with site owners about where they're at.
- [20:05]
C
Cognitive dissonance, I think is the phrase for this. It's really interesting talking to everybody there's like this love, hate relationship. Like everybody is using AI for something now, or almost everybody. Right. They may not like be having it write blog posts, but maybe it's using it for research on something. Right. I mean, I've started searching there instead of traditional search engines because I find it's. My searches are very specific for, you know, and, and so It's. The top 10 search results don't work for me anymore. So like the way all of us use the Internet is changing. And so the question is like there's this push pull of. Well, these AI models are trained on our copyrighted content. It's been stolen. I mean, and so if you're using it to create it is plagiarism. It is sophisticated plagiarism. I believe that, I think, and creators should be compensated for that. And there is not currently a mechanism for most creators to be compensated, you know, unless you're like the New York Times and you know, have a cadre of lawyers and can do a giant deal in the work. Yeah, right. There are things in the works to try to solve that problem. Cloudflare last summer announced pay per crawl, which hasn't really taken off, but Tollbit is doing one. There's another, another company working on there. There are people are working on developing mechanisms to basically put content behind a paywall for the crawlers, but not for people. And so that may come to fruition, I don't know, but that's definitely like in the works. And people are experimenting with that. You know, some of our clients just want to block all of it. But it also doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Um, there's three categories of crawlers for the most part. There's the training crawlers and those are the ones that are like doing the big crawls where they're getting, they're ingesting everything to create the model, but those also continue crawling to keep it fresh. Sort of like search indexing. That's kind of how I think about it. But there's also user agents and search agents. So if somebody goes into ChatGPT and says, hey, who's the best Pinterest marketing company, right? It may go do a fan out search, it's called. It might do 20 different searches on the Internet and when Simple Pin media comes up, it's going to come up in the search results. So if Simple Pin media though is blocking the crawls, then it may not, it'll move on to the next one. Right. And so in that moment it's actually doing a search crawl. So it's a different user agent for most of these. Like ChatGPT has different. So one of the things we do for our clients is we give them the option of blocking just the training crawlers, but not the user and search crawlers. So that way it's kind of. I think of it as the best sustain. Okay, so you're able to say, no, no, do not steal my content, but if somebody wants it, let them come to it through your chatbot, basically.
- [22:49]
A
Okay.
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C
A lot of this is kind of splitting hairs. There's not a lot of traffic relative to, like, traditional search. There's still not a lot of traffic here we're talking about. So some of this is still experimentation and we have to see where it goes. But I feel good about that approach because it just feels like striking a good balance at the moment.
- [23:07]
A
Yeah. And it's really all about striking a balance because nobody knows what they're doing. If we think about it, like, every day that we've progressed forward in this landscape with AI is a new day. And somebody who's saying they know everything is completely BS because none of us do. Right. And Colin, like, to your point, you could ship a ton of things every single day, but that might not be prudent. It might not be wise for the customers who are using your tool. So let's talk about the person who is. Well, actually, I'm going to jump into the person that is me, who I had social pug. Actually, I had social warfare and I switched to social pug, and then it went into grow, and then it went into hubbub. And honestly, my like, frame of reference for this was like, it's a social share plugin. It enables people to share content or on whatever platform they choose. And, you know, before we would instruct people to have just a few, because we would go to people's websites and they'd have like 10 there. But what I'm hearing as you're talking about all these features is that it's so much more robust than simply social share. So I, I want to say all that because I'm sure there's some people listening who might have similar history to me and just think that, like, oh, it's this. And you and I saw each other in Quebec City this summer and we were talking about the email feature, and so we installed this. So, Colin, can you talk a little bit about this email feature where it can send the article to them? I. I won't do a good job at explaining it. I added it by the way, I was good action taker.
- [24:47]
B
I know because I used it this morning on your website.
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A
Okay, good.
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B
So I'm on your mailing list.
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A
Perfect. Hopefully I surprise and delight you with great emails.
- [24:58]
B
So the feature is called Save this and it's really open ended as far as what it's supposed to do. The point of it is to do two things. Send a link to an email address for that person to return to your website later and add them to your mailing list. Whether you use mailchimp or kit or in there. We have about eight services in there I think right now, something like that that we integrate with. And then you can have a segment of the people that do this and you can email them specifically. And it's kind of really nicely integrated that way. That's really it. I mean, it's not overly complex, it's very customizable. So there's some complexity in that, in that everyone wants to use this in a different way. I'll give you an example of a way that you could be using it, which is that on your site you also have a guide that you allow someone to sign up to your mailing list and they get a free guide. You could combine the Save this form with that and incentivize them even more. So save this to your, to your email and get our free guide. And it would give them the free guide. However you do it now, you could integrate those two things. Okay, so yeah, that's what Save this does. I don't even profess to understand why it converts as well as it does. Because we had some reports of people where they were seeing 300% increase in their mailing list signups. And these are people that already had a mailing list sign up on their website. It wasn't that they didn't do that part of it, but this converts really well. And I think it's because people want to be able to come back later. And you're also getting two clicks for one. So you can imagine someone's out there searching for something. They find your website. They don't have a relationship with you yet, but they find your website. They may only be there for seconds sometimes in their day, and then they fill out this form and now they're part of your mailing list. So even if they forget to click that link and come back later, which if they did, you'd get an extra hit right there and then hopefully maybe that that relationship would actually develop even further because now they're coming back, they remembered your name, the Email they got, has your branding on it, all that kind of thing. But now you're able to email this person. So it really immediately starts a relationship. It's the first step in that engagement or that relationship. Go ahead, Andrew.
- [27:25]
C
I think the reason it performs so well is because it's a user first feature. It's not an annoying pop up that's like, you know, the traditional pop up opt in is like you land on a page, you start scrolling down and boom, you're interrupted by this thing saying hey, join my mailing list, right? And you're like, no, I don't even know who you are. I get out of my way so I can see the content and like it's, it's a, that's a, that's a really negative experience. So this flips that on its head and it basically it's so simple because it's like whatever the post is on, if they want to come back to it later, boom, save this for later. So it's perfect for recipe sites and travel sites in particular. You know, a recipe site, someone's at work trying to figure out what they're going to make for dinner and they find the recipe they want, they've got the form right there, save it for later, right? And put in their email address and goes into their inbox, which is everybody's to do list. So it, it's giving people what they want. And it's not just a generic opt in on every page. You know, if you're a barbecue blogger, it's not get my 10 Best Grill Recipe PDF on every single page. It's the opt in is just by, by definition giving them the post that they're on that they want. So it's, it's sort of dynamically or just intuitively the thing that they're going to want for later. And obviously some posts will perform better than others.
- [28:39]
A
But yeah, it's not. I was going to say that actually as you're scrolling through it just kind of grays out a little bit and then this kind of like doesn't even pop up but it like highlights more like brighter and then you go, oh, there's something there. And then you read it and say, oh yeah, I would like to save this for later. And I think that is such a less intrusive elements than the pop up because you're right, if I'm coming from Pinterest to a website and the pop up takes up the entire screen on my phone and I can't figure out how to X out of It, I'm like, this is driving me crazy. And then I have to close my whole app and I don't know where I was. And so this is such a great solution to where you are scrolling and it's, it's there. So I haven't looked at numbers. I did write a note to myself that I didn't look up my numbers yet to see how much it had increased for us. But email is such a huge part of our business and I would say anybody who's looking for something that is not a pop up but something that's just entering in along with the reader, this is such a great addition to it because it doesn't feel like you've added something annoying. So great job on that.
- [29:50]
C
Thank you. We didn't invent it. I like to say we didn't invent it. We perfected it.
- [29:55]
A
Hey, all you got to do, the
- [29:58]
C
other thing is this can be automatically inserted into your posts so you don't have to go edit your content to put it in. You just turn it on and it basically adds it at the top or the middle or the bottom of your posts. But we also have stats built in so you can see how many times each post has been saved. And so in the dashboard you can see what your most popular content is for saving. And obviously that may track with the, just the sheer traffic on it, but that may give you some clues as to what's working even better and help you help you improve it further.
- [30:25]
A
Well, and this is a basic question that I probably should have opened with, but does the plugin work on only WordPress sites or is it available on tons of different sites? Colin, do you want to take that one?
- [30:38]
B
WordPress is more than enough.
- [30:41]
A
Okay.
- [30:41]
B
We, we, we support WordPress.
- [30:43]
A
Okay.
- [30:44]
B
That's where it started. And to move it to another platform would be quite an undertaking, more than likely. So. Yeah.
- [30:51]
A
Okay, got it. So just those with WordPress, so somebody who's listening and thinking, do you integrate with Shopify? It's like, no, right? This is just WordPress sites.
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B
No.
- [31:00]
A
Okay. So Colin, you did some investigative work on my website before and you told me about it right before we hopped on and I agreed to go through a live feedback because I, I know Andrew sleep, like, here we go. Because I have added this and actually I will tell you, it is just migrated over the years, right? Like my whole goal in adding this, I set up my website in 2014. I added, you know, social warfare, then social pug 2016, 15 around those eras because that was the big Thing because people were visiting websites to get all of their information. Google, Pinterest, like, there we go. And then it just kind of faded into the background. And I think one of the things that we talked about before, before was that as people who work for other people's businesses, that is your priority. Your website isn't your own. So I've neglected this. I think I've just make sure I've like updated whenever it's been sold and paid the bill and updated my credit card. That's it. So I just want to preface this by saying I will tell you what to do, but I haven't done it. So what. What is that? Don't do as I say.
- [32:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. I don't think anything that I've found would meet that category of that you're not doing it. You're doing most of the things that you should do. I think there's a few things in there that you don't maybe even know exist. So I'll give you one example. We have follow buttons and we have follow buttons specifically for podcasters. So there. A lot of people don't think of their Spotify podcast page or their Apple podcasts page as a follow like they do on Instagram, let's say.
- [32:47]
A
But Apple changed the name of it actually recently to where you have follows instead of subscribes. So this tracks.
- [32:54]
B
So it's a follow button. And so I would urge you to think about on your homepage because you have non traditional buttons there.
- [33:02]
A
Yes, I do.
- [33:04]
B
And in the follow buttons, it is that button. And Apple podcast is bigger than all of them combined.
- [33:12]
A
I know. And it's the worst of them all.
- [33:16]
B
Yeah, that's usually the way things work. For whatever reason, we don't know why Facebook's as big as it is. And you know that. You know that. That's the way it goes.
- [33:23]
A
And most of our listeners, 80% are Apple.
- [33:26]
B
Yeah. So that's. And that's like everybody. So that's one thing is just to take advantage of those follow buttons that are specifically for podcasters. And you can add the one for YouTube Music, you can add the one for Pocket Casts, which is also owned by the same company that makes WordPress. Like things like that. You have images for Pinterest for your podcast episodes, but they look like they're articles. If you were to share them to Pinterest, they don't look like audio. So I would think that the image, or at least a choice of the image for people that share it to Pinterest, would it be Cool. It would differentiate it for sure because it's not just an article about what you should do with Pinterest, it's an audio conversation or interview or whatever your episode was. So adding a play button or an audio image or something, that would make it very clear in Pinterest that if they were to click on that, they can go and listen to that thing. Because many people now don't want to read a long article, but they'll listen to something while they're driving or they'll listen to something on the go or while they're doing something in the kitchen or whatever. So that would be kind of cool to give that as a, as a. Right. Now, when you click on your Pinterest button, it gives people a few options of the images that they can share, but having one of them that looks very clear that it is audio. And you probably could take away the other options, actually, because the other options are kind of more generic, you know, because you have other images on your site. So you can go right into hubbub now and make the setting change to have it only show one image when they pin. And that one image could be something that has a play button on it as just an example. All right, transcriptions with timestamps. Now, this is not a hubbub feature. This is a. Colin likes podcasts. And I wish everybody had this feature.
- [35:21]
A
Okay, got it.
- [35:23]
B
So transcribing used to be very hard to take a. Take a half hour piece of audio or an hour piece of audio and say, Andrew said this and Colin said that, right? Very difficult nowadays. Very easy because of these LLMs that can do it for you and have the timestamp. So if I search your blog or I search the web or I search in ChatGPT, I will be able to find the moment in your podcast when you. Someone mentioned something. It also gives you a lot more content on your website. It gives you a lot more keywords on your website. They can be links, which will also help with SEO that. Those kind of things. So having a transcript, it doesn't have to all show in one page and look ugly and everything you can.
- [36:10]
A
That's why we haven't done it right? Like, because we had a lot of feedback from people that they're like, I want to read, I don't want to listen. And then we were also optimizing for Google. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are like that. And so we were optimizing for, for SEO with Google. But I think to what I heard you just say there's still the optimization with LLM models and SEO from a transcript too, as well. Whereas kind of before it wasn't. I mean, I don't know. I'm making this up, but it was along the lines of Google didn't like things that sounded like robots. Right. But now. You know what I mean? So.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah, yeah. So that would be really. That would be nice for people that just maybe want to find particular topics. Like, let's say I'm, you know, because you have really nice content in the podcast episodes about. Let's just say one thing that I heard on one of your recent episodes is like, what size image should I create for Pinterest? Okay, well, wouldn't it be nice if I could find that moment that you mentioned that in. In one or more of your episodes?
- [37:13]
A
Because it's on there 175 times.
- [37:17]
B
So. And then if you used an action button, one of Hubbub's action buttons, you could say, find me the moment in time in every episode where someone mentioned Pinterest size. And it would show it all to you and then you'd be able to click on it and go right to it. Okay, so these are the kind of integrations that are just like, they just become so powerful to be able to have something like that.
- [37:43]
A
Totally. Okay, so I'm going to say something that's really interesting that I think, like, is clicking for me. So I, I told y' all before we started, I went to New Media Summit in Austin and it was really. I listened to kind of an interview that they did with Ryan Dice, and it was very fascinating because what he was talking about was, we're in an age of information, but. And people can get it everywhere, but they want the specific piece of information that's going to help them take a transformation quickly. And so as you're talking about this, it's. They could come to simple pin media. Sure. They could use our search button, but to find something quickly that will help them take that action. So if somebody's like, I don't know what size image to create. Let me see where Kate says this in a podcast. And they can listen to it now. It's like this custom GPT kind of model where it's like all of a sudden that's the information indexing for my website that comes to people quicker so that they can take action.
- [38:41]
C
Here's another idea for an action button for, for your site. You've got over 450 podcast episodes. That's overwhelming, right? For anybody who's your site and trying to learn something. So one of the ways these buttons work really well is they can be sort of semi dynamic where the prompt will include the URL of the page the person is on. So if somebody's listening to episode 456, I'm just scrolling around, finding an example, using Pinterest as a lookbook for an event, and creating unique experiences. Right? That's a specific topic. So let's say that topic resonates with someone and they want to go, oh, I want more of this kind of stuff talked about instead of having to use a search feature. What the button could be something like find my next listen. And so then the prompt that you, you write on your site is basically, I just listened to this podcast episode. I got a lot out of it. What's the next one from this site that would be good for me to listen to? Okay, and then it includes the URL. So that, and so they click that button, it opens up ChatGPT or Claude with that question as if they typed it in. And then when they hit go, it will find them a good podcast. And that also is bespoke to them. You know, if they use ChatGPT a lot, ChatGPT understands who they are, right? Because if I, as the owner of your dress, ask that question, it's going to find something that's about running a team, being a CEO, WordPress, something like that. Right. Whereas a food blogger is going to have a completely different take and it's going to find different episodes for the same exact query. So the idea is you want to write a prompt that will work for every post and for every person, but get them to like the next step so they can find that, that transformative moment more easily.
- [40:22]
A
Right? Because I, as I'm thinking this through and kind of the these like just you kind of blowing my mind right now, like all I like all of a sudden I can see how, you know, if there's this talk of like optimizing for, you know, chat or cloud or you know, the language models, you're essentially creating a really great user experience and kind of leveraging both together so that somebody who comes to your site, even if they're going to use Claude and they're going to kind of take it all in, you not only become the resource, but there's this kind cyclical event where they can kind of come back, especially if they're going deep, like I'm imagining somebody. Let's even take barbecue. They're learning how to barbecue or they're wanting to Focus on ribs. And they've discovered that this website is a really good website for them. Now they're in this place of. They're not going to seven different places to try to figure out the information. They're going to a resource that they're like, I like this. Give me more of what's on this site. Site so that I can continue to engage. Which is so advantageous for people who are ads monetized. Right. People who are affiliate monetized. Like you're keeping them around on your website. So I even see somebody coming from Pinterest who's art. Who's searching. This comes to the website. And now they're kind of engaged more in your website and they originated from a place of search and now they're continuing to do search.
- [41:52]
C
And I think that's the name of the game right now is the connection with your reader. You can leverage these tools to help increase that. I heard the term parasocial for the first time December last year. Interesting. And it's basically like celebrity or like when you know somebody who is on webinars or podcasts, you think you know them and you have a connection to them, even if you've never actually met. Right. And I've had people come up to me at conferences, say, Andrew, you're like a celebrity. And I'm like, what? And they're like, I want you on all the webinars. I'm like, great. You know, and so I, I have that on one side of the parasocial relationship with many of our clients. Right. And so publishers have that as well. And it's really not about just. Here's a recipe. Oh, I love Sally's recipes. They're amazing. They always work. I trust her.
- [42:44]
A
Right. Yes.
- [42:45]
C
And so you need to be thinking about how you can strengthen that relationship in every interaction. And using these tools is sort of like you, you know, linking. Like people were worried. I don't want to send people away from my website.
- [42:58]
A
Yes.
- [42:58]
C
I don't want them to click away to ChatGPT. Right. Because that feels icky.
- [43:02]
A
Right.
- [43:03]
C
But that's like old thinking now the new thinking is, no, you want them to have a conversation in ChatGPT about your website.
- [43:09]
A
Ah.
- [43:10]
C
Strengthening that relationship even off of your site.
- [43:13]
A
Yes.
- [43:14]
C
So, yeah, it becomes self reinforcing. And it's really about being omnipresent now in social. And you want to come up in the search results and in the AI conversations and being everywhere. And so it's your. You're an entity in and of yourself that People are going to then gravitate towards.
- [43:34]
B
Yes, Well, I use ChatGPT quite a bit and it has a memory of. Of me, like, what I do, what I own, what I care about. And I asked give me episode suggestions from this podcast based on what you know about me. And I gave it your podcast link. It suggests number four. 52, 351, 184, 411, 289, four, like. And it gives me exactly why, what should be the most important based on the fact that I'm a plugin builder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it already tailored to me out of the 400 or so episodes that you said you had. Like it it tailored to me what ones are prioritized based on how much it knows me. And just looking at the list, like, talking about Pinterest search, very important for us to know about how a website auditor helps increase Pinterest and Google Xeo. Very important.
- [44:31]
A
Yeah.
- [44:31]
B
So, like, there's, there's all kinds of things in there that, that would be very useful for me, and it's a hit list for me, and that's valuable. And now Chat GPT knows that I know about your podcast.
- [44:41]
A
Yeah. And I think this is one of the problems that content creators and marketers have been trying to solve for years is how to connect with people where they're at in the moment, to serve up what they need. And we don't always know, right? We know like an entry point or we could, like, Colin, it could send you to one, one podcast. But honestly, at that point, you might get an answer and go, I want more, but I don't want to spend the time searching for it. So now it gave you a pathway. And essentially that's what marketing is, right? Like, we're trying to give people a pathway to continue to engage with what we're doing. And I think it's genius that y' all have come up with this way in which to collaborate with websites that are current and work with the model and still fulfill the goals of the content creator. And it's not like they're in conflict anymore, but they're like, how can we partner together with this? Because the LLM models are not going away, right? Like, they're just, if anything, they're going to get stronger, they're going to get more powerful. And I, I have kids who are 20 and 19, and they're like, I don't want nothing to do with AI, Right? But in my head, I'm like, sorry, like, it's going to be a part of your life, you're going to have to do it. So it's trying to find these ways to have collaborative handshakes with it. And that's not to shame or make anybody want to use AI because in our house, we just don't talk about it around our kids. We're just going to let them figure it out on their own. But I think when you can create a tool, which you guys have done, I just find it so innovative and like, yeah, okay, this is great. I'll add, I'll do, I'll add it right, right after this.
- [46:20]
B
And you can imagine if you had the transcripts, it would be able to do even more laser targeted stuff. Yeah, you know, so, yeah, there's, there's a, there's a lot of really interesting ways and like I said, we're coming up with cool ways ourselves. We're seeing a lot of things. But I want to stress this because if, if anyone's listening to this and is worried that they're not creative enough to come up with uses for these action buttons and all that, you're better at this than we are. Because you know your content, you also know your reader better than we do. So just as a couple of real quick examples, you could say, oh, I'm going to create a translate this page button. But if you know your market is primarily people that live in a particular area of the world, but you would like to grow in a different area of the world, you might create a translation of your site specifically for that brand new market that you're really trying to get into and you want to address or whatever. So that's something that I would never be able to come up with for you because I don't know where you want to go next. I don't know that you're trying to grow in Latin America or whatever.
- [47:32]
A
Brazil's the second largest user of Pinterest. Right. So there's got to be marketers there who are trying to figure out 100%,
- [47:39]
B
start doing things in Portuguese and blah, blah, blah. So like they, that's very. That those are things that we can't come up with. So, so we know that our publishers are smarter than us and can come up with really, really awesome ways of using it, which is why we've left this so open ended. And you can create the prompts. We have a lot of prompt ideas on our site, but you can create the prompts yourself.
- [48:01]
A
Yeah. Andrew, you were going to say something before that.
- [48:03]
C
What was your thought going back to the the. That parasocial relationship or that relationship with your. Your readers. I think branding is so important. And branding to me is not, not just your logo. Right. It's, it's, it's really how people feel when they think of you and your site or whatever your. Your company is. And on mobile, there's such so little opportunity for branding. You know, and particularly with food blogs, they all kind of started to look the same. Right. Where you could just swap a different logo at the top and you won't know. And there's not a lot of space. You know, it's text and pictures and obviously your pictures hopefully are uniquely yours as well. But, but every opportunity where you can be like, custom and actually consistent and show up with your brand, like with NerdPress, I am like, these are our brand colors. We do not deviate. We have a whole style guide. Right. Like, this is how we present in the world and the consistency is important. So I do want to give a shout out to a feature we're about to release.
- [49:01]
A
Yeah.
- [49:02]
C
And this ties to Pinterest. I know we've been talking about AI, but I want to wrap up Pinterest a little on your podcast. So one of the features in Hubbub is a Pinterest hover button, where when you hover over an image that's in a post, it. It shows you a little Pinterest button. You can click on that and the reader can pin that image or they can pin all the images and pick from all the images in the post. We've had that for years. A couple years ago, we made an option so that on mobile, the Pinterest hover button always shows because there isn't really a hover state on mobile. So that. That exists right now. The next feature we're about to release is a custom image for the pin it button. So you can incorporate your logo. So, you know, like your logo, for example, the pin, you have the push pin. Right. Why not have a pin it using your pin logo as part of it? So it's sort of a branding and customization opportunity.
- [49:56]
A
Yeah.
- [49:57]
C
This is a feature that has not been asked for a lot, but I'm like, I want to build it because as soon as people see it, they're going to love it.
- [50:04]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [50:06]
C
It's an opportunity to be a little more you. Right.
- [50:09]
A
Yeah.
- [50:10]
C
And so we were about to release that people can upload any image they want and it'll just show that instead of the standard image. Really simple.
- [50:17]
A
Okay, okay.
- [50:17]
C
But I wanted to at least give
- [50:19]
B
that A shout out and background color so you can choose your brand color too.
- [50:23]
A
Oh, okay. Well, and actually so I'm glad you brought that up, Andrew, because a lot of people obviously ask me about the best plugin for Pinterest and it always seems to feel like there's some confusion about. You said it earlier too, Colin. I think selecting a particular image or you know, all of these things, I would say like two tips for somebody to optimize sharing for Pinterest that you've seen that are like this. You. If you do nothing more than two things with these plugins, with this plugin, what should it be as it pertains to Pinterest, it really comes down to
- [51:02]
B
the publisher wanting control of what gets shared to Pinterest or if they'd rather the user to have greater control. So I'll give you two examples. One is if you'd rather have greater control like on your podcast, I would actually have one image per episode that's shareable there. That looks a very specific way with the information that's important there, your branding. And then also something that denotes the fact that it's a podcast episode and that in one thumbnail gives them a lot of information, looks like you, and is very obvious that they can listen to it. But others may have content that they want to be shared by a wide variety of people. And those people may use Pinterest very differently from one another and have different ideas about what they should share there. When we were at an event a few years back, this one publisher showed me what they do and they create many variations of their Pinterest image in various aesthetics. So black and white or some pastel color or whatever it was different fonts on the font faces on the actual image for that was getting shared. And this allowed people to create aesthetic boards. So if they wanted to create a board that matched a certain look and feel, something really high end and techy or something cozy or something this or something that they would be able to do that. So they were putting the reader in charge of what those, what that content look like on Pinterest. So depending on what you'd want to do, whether you want to be in control of what goes there or you want the reader to be able to choose, you can do both of those things with hubbub.
- [52:47]
A
Very fascinating. That's a great use case. And I think that shows to your point that each publisher is really in charge of their creativity, the way that they're going to go. And also I would say paying attention to how much traffic you're getting from Pinterest and what, what posts they are landing on. You know, to your point, Andrew, of being very specific in that pin share piece, maybe there's something where you're getting a ton of traffic to one particular blog post and you want to have this custom, you know, hover over pin it button because that makes the most sense.
- [53:20]
C
The feature Colin's talking about is multiple hidden pins. So you can basically set as many hidden images that are Pinterest images. They don't have to be displayed in your post content, but when somebody clicks the pin it button, you get a selector and you can choose from multiple. An example I love is a travel site that has like 10 activities at a destination. So like 10 best restaurants or 10 restaurants to go to in Mexico City, let's say, and somebody's planning a trip to Mexico city instead of one pin image that's like 10 restaurants in Mexico, which is kind of a generic for the post. You could do 10, you could have that, but also have 10 separate pin images, one for each restaurant you're recommending. So if somebody really wants to go to a certain restaurant, they can pin with that image and it'll make their board more specific even though it's all going to the same post. But that way is much more personalized there. And so that, and that could be applied for any sort of roundup post.
- [54:14]
A
Right, right. Well, which is actually what Pinterest wants with targeted freshness in their images. Right. Like they would want it to be like it's a new piece of content and if you are leading it to a place that still matches, image wise, that's what they're looking for. Right. So you're not doing anything to lead somewhere else. Or it's like you're not going to find that type of image in the post or whatever that type of information. So this helps stay within those boundaries, which I think is important.
- [54:43]
C
It doesn't need to be the exact same image. Right. Show if.
- [54:46]
A
No, they've said it needs to make sure that it has some kind of connection. So like somebody wouldn't come onto your website and find that it's not. You're not, they're not in the right place.
- [54:59]
B
Well, the image, the image is on the page and so Pinterest would have, would know about that image anyway.
- [55:04]
A
Yes, correct.
- [55:05]
C
But for a human, it's like if you're using trips to Machu Picchu.
- [55:10]
A
Yeah.
- [55:11]
C
Let's say like it doesn't have to be exact pin image, but maybe it's Another view of the room, right?
- [55:17]
A
Yes.
- [55:17]
C
You can tell it's. And it's going to have this tainting texture and seeing, you know, it's obviously like off the same roll of film, so to speak.
- [55:24]
A
Yes. Yeah, exactly. It's like you don't want to have like Machu Picchu in your image and then send it to something in Mexico City. It's like, okay, now we're. You're talking about maybe Central and South America, but it's like you're not nailing it. Right. You want to be very targeted. So. Yeah. On the same page with that.
- [55:44]
C
Can I say something else about what we're talking about in terms of these features that are empowering publishers to do things? I want to encourage everybody listening to think about what their readers want and would benefit from rather than looking at what everybody else is doing or what they want. Yes.
- [56:04]
B
Because even a publisher, you might say, my favorite favorite thing in the world is Facebook, and I'm on it every single day. If the people that read your website aren't on Facebook, you don't need the Facebook share button. So as an example for your website too, I think Blue sky would play very well on your site.
- [56:20]
A
Oh, interesting. Okay.
- [56:21]
B
So you could easily just turn that network on. Nothing else you have to do and just see if there's any results from that. But yeah, Andrew's point is, you know, do what the reader wants, not what you are like, oh, I don't like this network or that whatever. But you. They might think it's their favorite one.
- [56:39]
A
Yeah, we find that a lot with people when it comes to Pinterest is that especially a lot of people have either outsourced it over the years or they've disconnected from the platform and they're like, either I'm frustrated with the changes on the platform or AI slop or whatever it might be. So they're like, I'm not going to add a pin share button. Like, nobody's. Nobody want. I don't want that. Right. But then you go and look at analytics and the majority of their traffic is coming from Pinterest, and it's like, maybe this is a missed opportunity. We know you don't like it, which is fine. But connecting with people where they're at and taking a deep dive and looking at your analytics. But also to your point, Colin, being willing to take a test and go test it for six months, see if you get engagement on it, and if you don't, you don't. But right now, where we are all trying to figure out where engagement is going to happen. And it feels like there's not this wave anymore. Like I'm going to get majority from here, majority for. It's almost like there's breadcrumbs being left around and you just never know how you're going to impact a few people on that platform and then what they're going to do with your content and then sharing it out. Because I think that is such a powerful thing for somebody to do to share your content. They felt like it was so good that they sent it to somebody or they sent it somewhere. That's huge.
- [57:59]
B
And we're seeing things not happening on social media anymore. It's happening within DMs. So we have share buttons for WhatsApp, for SMS, Telegram. Like those are the platforms that are. We're seeing a much like. I was kind of surprised we did add some of these networks since we've acquired it because there was some demand. But then you start to go see people's websites and they're really turning those things on because now I, I know from my own use I don't share nearly as much as I did on social networks as I now do in a family. WhatsApp chat.
- [58:34]
A
Yes. Yes.
- [58:35]
B
You know, because I just send to my family like hey, yeah, or a text thread or whatever it may be. So we have share buttons for those things as well because that's where people are sharing things.
- [58:43]
A
It's true. I will copy the URL and I'll share it. I'm like, oh, you got to read this or you got to, you know, like so making that so, so much easier for people to do. So good. Okay. This. I. I spent a long time since I've gone a long time on this podcast. But it's been so good that I'm like it. It's worth the listen. So those people who have made it this far, one, congratulations too. I hope your mind is popping with ideas. Where should people go to begin learning? If someone is saying, I, I either have old share buttons on my site and maybe that's the only reason I thought they were there. I have not reframed what it is that I need to think about when it comes to sharing beyond social and they're interested in investigating hubbub, where do they go to learn more information? And I'll leave a link down below, but I guess like, what is their first step they should take?
- [59:36]
B
Our website is morehubub. Com. There are three Bs in hubbub.
- [59:43]
C
Okay.
- [59:44]
A
Yeah.
- [59:44]
B
Morehub.com.
- [59:46]
A
okay.
- [59:47]
B
And yeah, you can learn about some of the features that we have there. And if you're, if you're listening to this though, and you already have the plugin installed and you've never really changed the settings, we've seen that a lot. Somebody installs it, gets it set up and never has adjusted it or changed it. I just urge you to take a look again. Take a second look. Go through the sharing networks that you currently have turned on. See if you're even sending people to the right follow buttons. Because I can't tell you how many times I've seen an Instagram icon on someone's website that doesn't go anywhere. Yes, because they forget to add the URL. So whether you're using our button or some other button, please make sure that all the buttons on your website actually go where you want people to go. And don't send them to networks that you're not doing anything on. You know, if you don't use Facebook, but you have a Facebook page that you haven't updated, don't feel bad. Remove it from your site if you have to and put, and put in there whatever network you are currently using. I would say don't sleep on Flipboard. It sends a lot of traffic and people have for some reason forgotten about that. Then they turn it back on and it really does make a difference. And some of these new networks are growing so fast that there's an opportunity to be the only whatever you are on those platforms. So if you are a travel blogger and you're not using threads, Instagram and Pinterest and other things are saturated with travel bloggers are already get on threads. You know, even though they're already at 250 million people, you're still in a smaller pool than the 3 or 4 billion people that are on Instagram. And so just keep changing and keep adapting just like we are with the software. And if you're a customer of ours, you get emails, please read the emails and you'll see that we are putting more features in there that are really trying to make your life easier. We're trying to help your website grow, we're trying to help your traffic grow, your mailing list grow, and ultimately your revenue grow, if that's what your ultimate goal is. So yeah, check it out.
- [62:00]
C
And I have ADD because there are probably many people because of the nearly 10 year history of this plugin, there are probably many people who don't have a current license. So if you're stuck, I was just going to say that 2 0.0. If you're stuck on that version, there's been a lot of developments since. So you may need to renew your license and. And then you're going to actually get the benefits of all those features we've talked about. So I know Colin has started emailing people who are on old licenses because we don't want people to miss out on the new features and the security fixes and all of the other enhancements we've been doing.
- [62:32]
A
Yeah, yeah. And hopefully even with the conversation that we've had today, people will want to update their license because of all these new features and ways that you can optimize it and to see it beyond a social share button feature to see it into really truly that action button feature that you get to determine and this is part of your marketing, how you interact with people and lead them down a path and really help create. Create a good user experience for them. So, yeah, I'll leave a link down below. So, Andrew and Colin, thank you so much for this. We haven't had anything where we've talked about this in quite a long time. Probably Andrew, you and I did one a couple years ago, but I don't even think it was talking about hubbub. So yeah, I just appreciate both of you and your expertise and your innovativeness and how you're helping to make this plugin better. So thanks so much.
- [63:21]
B
Thank you.
- [63:22]
C
Thank you, Kate. It's been pleasure.