Pinterest is one of the main tools to be using in your blogging toolbox. Together with focusing on SEO, Pinterest can be one of the core drivers of web traffic, readers, customers and subscribers to your blog. Pinterest is a platform that you cannot afford to ignore, and if you have been then it’s time to turn that around, put all your other tasks on hold and focus on this excellent platform for bringing readers to your website!
In this guide, I share everything you need to do to set up Pinterest correctly or get your Pinterest in order if you already have an account to start seeing all of that lovely referall traffic coming to your website.
We will cover the following topics in this article which step by step guides for each section.
- Why Pinterest is such a valuable platform if you want to take your blog to the next level
- My experience with Pinterest and why I LOVE it!
- How to set up and optimize your Pinterest page
- How to optimize your pins to get clicks, saves and shares
- Using group boards
- How to automate your Pinterest strategy using Tailwind and Tailwind Tribes
- How to understand your Pinterest analytics
WHY SHOULD YOU BE USING PINTEREST?
First things first we need to re-introduce Pinterest and exactly what this platform is all about. Pinterest is not a social channel. Pinterest is essentially a visual search engine and therefore you need to think of how you use it in the same way that you think about optimising for Google search.
Pinterest is a powerhouse tool that you can use to drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog, generate sales leads and get email sign-ups. Most people will view Pinterest as a place for getting home inspiration idea, recipes, and maybe some beauty tips. They don’t consider this as a tool they can use as part of their blogging strategy.
In numbers, Pinterest is an important platform:
- 200 million Active Monthly Users
- 70 million from the US (60%)
- 1 billion + Pinterest Boards
- 2 million users save shopping pins per day
- 81% are females
- But 40% of new signs up are male (60% females)
- 7% of pins pinned on Pinterest are by men
- Most active pinners are under 40 years old. (the median age is 40)
- 30% of all US social media users are on Pinterest
- 87% of pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest!
- 80% access Pinterest on a mobile device
- More than 14million articles are pinned every day
- Average time spent on Pinterest is 14.2 minutes
With so many users actively pinning on the Pinterest platform and app, pinning to Pinterest from websites they visit and using this as a source of getting the information they are looking for – you cannot afford to ignore this platform!
WHAT WAS MY PINTEREST EXPERIENCE?
I personally love Pinterest, both for finding the information I am looking for and for bringing readers to my blogs.
When I started blogging it was a little while before I realised Pinterest was going to be an important part of my strategy. This is because when you begin blogging there are so many different platforms to use and tasks to do that it can be easy to ignore some of them. But it’s never too late to get started with your Pinterest strategy or to revisit your strategy.
My favourite thing about Pinterest is that time spent managing this platform decreases over time, and at the same time Pinterest traffic continues to grow!
Here is a little bit about my experience using Pinterest for my blogs and why I LOVE it:
- When I started concentrating on Pinterest, planning a Pinterest strategy and optimising the We Are Travel Girls Pinterest page within just two weeks I saw referrals to our blog from Pinterest go from zero to the second biggest driver behind Search Engines!
- Pinterest now brings around ¼ of our website traffic every day
- Articles that received high engagement and re-pins on Pinterest became more popular over time
- Traffic from Pinterest was giving our articles more domain authority and in turn raising their Google rankings
- The number of followers did not matter as much as other social platforms, we only had around 200 followers when I started to focus on Pinterest, but this did not seem to matter to the referral traffic and unique views
- Today we have around 15,000 followers, but we receive over 2 million unique views per month on We Are Travel Girls Pinterest page!
SETTING UP YOUR PINTEREST PAGE CORRECTLY
So now you understand why you need to be using Pinterest and why I love it, let’s get started with setting up your Pinterest account or giving your account a sping clean if you already have one up and running.
If you do already have a Pinterest account don’t skip past this section completely, there are some important aspects of your Pinterest set up that you need to action manually and may not have done in the past.
Setting up a Pinterest Account
- Go to https://www.pinterest.com/ to open your Pinterest account
- Click on the Create A Business Account option which will take you to a second login/account set up screen
- Use the email address associated with your business/blog
- Create a secure password
- Next, select your preferred language and country
- Add your Business Name – this should be the blog, brand or business name, not your personal name
- Select the most appropriate field under the ‘Tell Us About Your Business’ section
- Claim your other accounts, Instagram, YouTube, and Etsy
- Answer the question if you would be interested in running ads in the future (it doesn’t matter what you answer here if you have a business account you can set up ads at a later date even if you select ‘no’.
- Then choose the topics that best describe your business
- Next, you will see a Get your handy browser button window. This is the Pinterest Google Chrome extension which is a great tool so make sure to click on Get It Now and install the extension. It will be very helpful later when you are pinning from your own website!
- Now your account is created, and you will have to follow the steps later in the article to set up your profile correctly, your boards and optimise your Pinterest for search.
Convert To A Business Account
If you have a personal Pinterest account set up, but not a business account then you should convert this to a Business Account. If you will be making money in any way from the referral traffic or for any kind of commercial purpose then it is also required that you have a business account, “Commercial use of Pinterest If you want to use our Products for commercial purposes you must create a business account and agree to our Business Terms of Service.”
If your Pinterest account is a personal account that you have only used for saving wedding inspiration, and cat memes then it will be simpler to start a fresh new business account specifically for your blog rather than converting your personal account. If you have been using the personal account for blogging purposes or have been actively saving pins and pinning to boards related to your blogging niche then go ahead and convert this. But make sure to read this article in full and complete all the steps to correctly clean up your Pinterest account, clean up your pins and boards that are detailed later so it is optimal for your blog.
The business account will give you the following:
- Detailed analytics for your Pinterest account
- Ability to promote your pins
- Helps to increase brand authority
To convert to a business account, go to https://Business.Pinterest.com
- Click the red ‘Convert Your Existing Account’ button.
- Select your ‘Business Type,’ and update your ‘Contact Name,’ and ‘Email Address,’ if necessary.
- Update your Profile Info
- Agree to the Pinterest Agreement, then click Convert My Account
Set Up Rich Pins
Rich Pins provide more information to each of your pins, including your blog name, description text, and a website link. This tells Pinterest more about your content and ensures Pinterest knows if it’s quality content.
- Instructions to set up https://business.pinterest.com/en/rich-pins
- Note that it can take a little while for these to get verified.
YOUR PINTEREST PROFILE
Once your business account is set up or converted you need to make sure that your Pinterest profile is correctly laid out. Go through each of the steps in this section to optimise your profile for search.
Edit Your Profile & Settings
- To edit your profile, go to the three dots at the end of the navigation bar, then select Settings.
In the Edit Profile section, you can edit all of the information about your profile.
- Make sure your profile image is the same as your other social profiles. A personal photo of you tends to be better than a logo depending on your blog niche
- Check your profile name and URL are easy to find and relate to your blog name. Pinterest will automictically assign you a URL, make sure this makes sense. For example, my Pinterest URL is https://pinterest.com/beckyvandijk , however, it may have assigned me something like https://pinterest.com/bvd123 which does not relate to my blog or business. You can adjust this to be relevant for your blog. This is especially important if you are converting from a personal account.
- Write a short description about your blog, this should follow the same format as your about page. What do you do, who are you, how you can help your followers? This description should also use relevant keywords that relate to what your blog is about.
- Add keywords to your display name. Then when someone searches for a specific topic in your niche your name is more likely to pop-up. As I mentioned Pinterest is a search engine, not a social tool so apply all the same principles you know about SEO here. E.g. In mine I have Business and Blogging Tips, so people searching for these topics might find my profile in the search results.
- Add a call to action in the description. This is another place to include a call to action to join your email list.
- Add your location.
Next, go to the Settings / Account Settings option. Here you can adjust Basic Information including language, location, email address, contact name, your business type, and login options. If you started a new account then this should all be set up correctly but if you are converting an account check all these settings are correct.
Then click on Settings / Claim option to claim your website Claiming your website allows you to get attribution and Analytics for your content which may already appear on Pinterest, it is important to claim your URL so that Pinterest knows it is yours. You can also use this area to set up an RSS feed to Auto Publish from your website and to claim other profiles, Instagram, YouTube and Etsy.
Finally, go through the Notifications / Privacy & Data / Security sections and check through each of these Settings Options to ensure you are happy with the notifications you will receive, have personalized your search and added any security to your account. I suggest switching on the Two Factor Authentication in the Security section.
Create Your Pinterest Boards
Now your profile is set up you need to create a set of boards that you can pin yours and other people’s content to.
Pinterest boards are a way of organizing the content that you pin to your profile. Let’s think about your boards as categories and topics, typically the ones that your target audience is looking for. This might (and probably should!) align with some of the categories that you have on your blog.
You want to make sure that someone coming to your page is not put off because the content is not what they are looking for. For example, if your blog is about financial advice, your readers probably won’t be interested in your outdoor garden inspiration board! So make sure those less relevant boards are secret or removed – we will cover how to do this later.
What Boards Do You Need To Have?
You should get started with 10- 20 boards that are relevant to your niche and blog.
To create a new board, go to the top of the board’s page and select the Create Board with the red plus symbol.
Then name your board and click Create. You will now have a brand-new board that you can start to pin to.
You should have these boards set up on your profile.
- Blog posts board where you pin blog posts from your blog only so visitors can find your content easily.
- Specific category boards based on what content you plan to pin and your blog niche.
- Freebies or eBooks boards if you have something to give away, otherwise this could come later.
- Create one or more group boards A board that you invite other Pinterest users to collaborate on and pin their own pins. You can set rules such as for every pin they pin to the board, they must also pin another pin from the board – this helps to get your own pins re-pinned on Pinterest.
- If you are not sure what boards to create, use Pinterest to help you! Type in some keywords that relate to your blog in the search and see what Pinterest suggests.
- Don’t create boards that don’t make sense for your audience, or your niche. Keep the boards on brand, and if they are not on brand make them private!
Set Your Featured Boards
Featured boards appear at the top of your profile and you need to set these up manually as they do not appear automatically when you create your Pinterest account.
The Featured Boards that you select to appear here should be your 5 most important boards that you want people to see first when they visit your Pinterest Profile. For example: If you have a clothing company, you could use this to showcase new arrivals. Or for a travel company, upcoming trips. Or simply Latest Blog Posts, or Freebies.
Set up Instructions: https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/your-big-beautiful-new-showcase
Pinterest Board & Pin Clean Up
If you already have a Pinterest account that you are switching to a business account, you will need to do some clean up on the existing boards on your profile and the content you have pinned.
Work through each of these steps to clean up the content on your profile:
- Hide all the boards that are unrelated to your blog niche. You don’t have to delete them, just set them as secret boards.
- To do this go to your Boards page, click on the pencil icon on the bottom right of the board you want to edit/set to secret. Then go to Visibility and tick the box to Keep This Board Secret
- Update the boards you want to keep In the edit board section for the boards you want to keep that are related to your niche make sure they are named correctly, have keyword-rich descriptions, have the correct category, include a cover image or pin, and you have added any collaborators (relevant if more than one person will manage you Pinterest profile.
- Clean up the content on the board’s Portrait images and pins are preferred. Make sure your Pinterest page is visually appealing and followers will want to return and pin from it for their own inspiration. To mass delete on one board use the Organize option in the upper right of the board.
- Check the quality of what you pin A lot of content on Pinterest is clickbait and does not actually lead to the intended article. Only re-pin real content, and delete poor quality content you have previously pinned.
- Move pins to more appropriate boards using the Organize option on the upper right of the board. You can select and move multiple pins at once to another board.
- Merge boards together this option is available at the bottom of the edit board screen, you can also choose to archive or delete the board here.
- Clean up who you are following and make sure these are relevant for your niche
Organising Your Boards
It is important that you organize and optimise the new (and old) Pinterest boards that you create.
For each of your boards, you should do the following, these steps can all be implemented when you click on the Edit Board pencil icon:
- Create branded board covers or select an image / pin that represents the content on the board. I created my covers in Canva, then pinned these to the relevant Pinterest board and selected them as the board cover in Edit Board
- Create board names that are simple and searchable. You don’t need the name to be flowery or personal, and you should not use any plays on words or clever use of spelling.
- Optimise your boards, as you would for search engines
- Set the correct category for the board travel, food, style, etc.
- Have a detailed description of what pins the board contains. Pinterest is like a search engine so include the words people would be searching Pinterest or Google.
- Add sections into your boards to divide up your content for your audience and to add a bit more SEO juice!
- Layout your boards with the most important ones at the top of the page, so visitors to your page see the most important content first. This is of course content from you own blog.
- Pin around 50 pins to get the board started. These should be on brand and should relate to the topic of the board.
- Add collaborators if more than one person will be managing and pinning to your account.
Now you have your boards created and optimised it’s time to start pinning to them.
What Should You Pin & How Often?
You should aim to have at least 50 pins on each of your Pinterest board to get started. This helps visitors to see that you are active on Pinterest. Ideally, these pins should be from content on your own blog it is ok to mix this in with relevant and related content from other blogs, websites and Pinterest.
Make sure that you are pinning items that are on brand and consistent with what you are offering your visitors and always verify the quality of what you pin. Don’t just pin at random, click through and check that the pin links to the content that it says that it will.
Many people use Pinterest as a way of getting traffic to their website in shady ways, they will use an enticing Pinterest cover image or graphic that may offer 20 Blogging Tips, but leads to a spammy vitamins website. So be cautious with what you pin, since other pinners can tell Pinterest if the pin is quality of not using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons when they click on a pin. Make sure you also use this feedback method to let Pinterest know if you see any bad pins or pinners!
You should be aiming to pin around 30 – 50 pins per day. (We will look at how to automate this later in the article)
Research from Tailwind tells us that:
“Follower growth generally increases as you Pin more but will flat line somewhere above 50 Pins per day. Pinners going above 50 Pins a day see a large drop off of re-pins. Engagement drastically suffers above 50 pins. There are diminishing returns in extremely high-volume Pinning. It appears that penalties begin to occur at high Pin rates, which decrease the visibility of your Pins and profile.”
Branding Your Pinterest Pins
When you start to pin your own content from your blog, remember that the Pin covers – i.e. what the person will see first should also be on-brand with the rest of your business and blog.
When you pin content, you should create a Pinterest Cover graphic that is on-brand:
- Use 2-3 colours
- Use 2-3 fonts
- Use the same styling/design
- Match your website
- The idea is that someone would scroll through Pinterest and instantly be able to recognize a pin that’s from you!
If you lack design skills, then use a tool like Canva which has ready-made Pinterest designs that you can customize. Alternatively, you can even buy customizable Pinterest covers on websites like Creative Market and Etsy.
Example of Pinterest Covers created using Canva.com
Pinning From Your Blog
For every blog post that you write and publish on your blog, you should be doing the following for Pinterest:
- Every blog post you publish should include a pin ready cover image. That is also embedded in the blog post for visitors to pin.
- Pin two-three different cover images for every blog post and pin some images without graphics too. Use Social Pug to input several hidden pins that only appear when someone pins from your site (rather than having several pin options within the blog post which just looks messy)
- Write keyword-rich descriptions Think of this in the same way that you do for SEO as Pinterest is like a search engine. Use hashtags.
- Have multiple boards for just your blog posts. I have a blog post board to save pins with cover images including the blog post title and separate boards just for photos.
- Pin your pin to your blog posts board first
- Pin your pin to all your own relevant boards next Ideally, you should pin natively from your website, and not simply re-pin the first pin you pinned to the blog post board
- Pin your pin to group boards you are a member of
- Schedule your pin to be pinned in the coming weeks and months using Tailwind
Make Your Blog Pinterest Friendly
Whilst pinning your own content is great, you also want visitors to your blog to be pinning your content directly from there. There a few things that you can do to make your blog Pinterest friendly, both for your own use and for your visitors.
- Set up Pinterest chrome extension This extension makes it easier and quicker for you to pin content to Pinterest from your own website (and other sites) Instructions: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/all-about-pinterest-browser-button
- Make Pinterest Social Sharing easy Have social sharing at the top, side, and bottom of the blog post using a plugin such as Social Pug which you can customise to the colours and fonts of your website. I use Social Pug for this on both my blogs.
- Add the Pinterest save button to your website It is important to add the Pinterest Save button to your site so that visitors can easily save images linking to your blog posts straight to Pinterest. The Pinterest Save button will appear on the top left of the images on your website and when clicked on the visitor can save this image, which will include a link to your website. You should also brand the Pinterest save button to fit with your website branding. Instructions: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/build-save-it-button-your-site
- Update old blog posts If you have a lot of blog content and have not been focused on Pinterest it’s time to go back and clean it up and make in Pinterest friendly
- Create graphic Pinterest covers for old posts and add these to the articles
- Ensure you have alt-text on all your images in the Media Gallery as this will appear when someone pins the image. If you do not have this, it may not appear in search results on Pinterest. Tip – using a tool like Social Pug will allow you to write long keyword-rich descriptions that will appear when someone pins the images and pin covers from your website.
- Update blog post images so you have the best, most attractive images included that are likely to get pinned
- Pin all your old posts to Pinterest on your boards and other group boards with keyword-rich descriptions
SEO YOUR PINTEREST
Just like Google, someone will search for something in Pinterest and the results will appear according to what Pinterest thinks is the most valuable result based on the search inquiry. Pinterest uses information about the pin to determine how valuable and relevant it is. Many of the principles of search engine optimisation also apply to Pinterest.
Where Should Your Keywords Appear On Pinterest?
Keywords and key phrases are important for your Pinterest profile, your boards, and your pins. These should appear in the following places:
- Profile Name
- Profile Description
- Your Board Descriptions
- Pin Descriptions
- Blog post title – change it up from your blog
- Blog post content itself on your blog
- In the alt-text on images in your blog posts
Using Keywords In Pin Descriptions
Think about what your target audience is searching for and what specific search strings they may be entering in the search bar on Pinterest and then include these into your Pin descriptions.
- Write full sentences to describe the pin
- Include specific and theme-based keywords
- Use long-tail keywords (phrases) rather than simple keywords as these are easier to rank for than a single keyword such as Paris, it is better to write Most Instagrammable Cafes In Paris
- Include as many keywords as you can in a natural way
- Use some hashtags
- Include a call to action
THE PINTEREST SMART FEED
Remember that Pinterest is a search engine, not a social media platform so the best and most relevant content appears, in the same way, you would get results when you Google something. The smart feed is Pinterest’s algorithm that it uses to ranks you (and your pins) according to how good they think your content is and if you are a quality pinner. This is based on the quality of your pin, where the pin leads to (the source, i.e. the blog or website) and the rating the pin is then assigned by Pinterest.
How To Make Pinterest Like you
How can you make sure that Pinterest likes you and shows your content in search results?
- Clean Up Your Pins Make sure you optimized your pins and the pin descriptions so that Pinterest knows you are a quality pinner.
- Change Your Descriptions If you re-pin the same image lots of times, make sure to change up the description.
- Pin High-Quality Content As mentioned previously make sure you check what you are pinning. Does the pin lead to the correct website and information it claims to? If you pin lots of low-quality content, you will be penalized. Obviously the same goes for your own content. Pinners can like, comment and use the tried it option on your pin so don’t be misleading!
- Get Others To Pin Your Content Have pin it buttons on your website so it’s easy for readers to pin.
- Prioritise Your Own Content Above Other People’s Content. Pinterest prefers the content you have pinned from your own website.
- Native Pinning From Your Website is better than repining the same pin onto different boards. By this, we mean actually creating a new pin each time
- Pin To The Most Relevant Board first Distribution priority is given to the pin that is pinned first, so make sure it is on the most relevant board before you re pin to other boards.
- Click Worthy & Enticing Content Users should be encouraged to click through and read the content you are pinning.
- Pin At The Best Times Of Day For Your Audience Tools such as Tailwind will help you to do this.
- Use Tailwind Tribes This will get other people pinning your pins
- Be Consistent you will be rewarded for consistently pinning and using the platform. 30-50 pins per day is a good target to aim for
- Use the platform daily!
FREEBIES & OPT-IN INCENTIVES
Create Freebies and Opt-In Incentives that go together with the blog posts on your website and can be used as an incentive for Pinterest users to save and click through to your content, as well as sign up to your email list.
To do this you will need to create a set of freebies, then having either a series of landing pages with email sign up for each opt-in incentive or a resource library where you have them all.
- Create a password-protected Resource Library that can be accessed by subscribing to your blog (use my How To Set Up A Resource Library eBook to create yours)
- Put all your freebies into the Resource Library
- Pin all your freebies to Pinterest natively so that other users will re-pin and click through to access these
- Create a dedicated freebies board on your Pinterest profile where you pin these to
- Include a mention of the free download on the Pinterest cover so that a user instantly knows that they will get access to the blog post, and also a printable downloadable or eBook.
For my travel blog, WeAreTravelGirls.com I created a set of downloadable checklists for things to do in different locations and pinned these as images to Pinterest. The image link goes to the Resource Library sign up page where a visitor can subscribe to the website to get access to the full library which also includes Destination Pocket Guides, other eBooks and Packing Lists.
In the library, they can download the specific list that the pinner had previewed on Pinterest or many other items we have created in the library.
GROUP BOARDS
Group boards are Pinterest boards that more than one person can collaborate on and pin their content. The board is created by a Pinterest user and they can invite other Pinterest users to join the board and pin their pins.
The benefit to the members who join the boards is that when you pin your content to this board then the followers of that board will see your pins. So if you are just getting started on Pinterest, only have a handful of followers on your own profile, getting your content onto a board that has thousands or tens of thousands of followers will help get your content noticed quicker. Group boards are an integral part of your Pinterest strategy to get more people to re-pin your content, increase your traffic, leads and follows.
Finding Group Boards To Join
How do you go about finding group boards in your niche? Here are 3 simple ways to find some group boards to get you started.
- If you don’t know where to start with finding shared boards that you can join, simply go to the Pinterest page of some of your peers and look at the boards they are a part of and then request to join these if they are relevant for your niche.
- Use the Pinterest search function and search by boards. Type in ‘group board’ – many Pinterest users will name the board with group board somewhere in the title or the description
- Use https://pingroupie.com/ and search for boards in your blogging niche
How do you know if it’s a group board? You can see the little icon on the bottom left of the board which shows more than one user is contributing to that board (see image example below)
Which Group Boards Should You Join?
Don’t join every board that you can possibly find. Like everything in blogging, you should be selective about which boards you are a part of.
Here are a few tips on how to determine which boards to join, and then later which boards you should remain a member of. It’s perfectly ok to leave a board if you find that it’s not working for you.
- Look for boards in your niche
- Is the board active and are people pinning regularly to it?
- Check the content shared on the board and determine if it’s good quality content
- How many people are following the board? If there are only a few people, it may not be worth your time.
- What are the group board rules? Most boards will have specific rules that you must follow if you are pinning to it, for example for every pin you must re-pin 2 other pins from other pinners. Ensure you will be committing the time to your Pinterest strategy to follow the rules of the board.
- Use your analytics to check out which boards are performing for you and leave ones that are not. The analytics shows you which boards have the most impressions, clicks and saves.
Joining A Group Board
Once you have discovered group boards that you would like to join you need to get accepted to them.
Typically, the group board will have a description of how to join the board – often requesting to be added as a contributor by email, with your profile, what you pin and your Pinterest email address to the board owner. The owner will usually ask you to also follow their Pinterest profile as well as the specific group board. If you are not sure who the board owner is it will the first person on the list of photos on the board.
Some boards may have been set up to allow you to request to join with a simple button request which appears in the upper right. This makes it much easier for you to simply ask to join on the Pinterest platform. This is a relatively new feature so not all group boards are set up this way.
If you plan to create your own group boards, I suggest setting up the ‘request to join’ so you can easily approve new members rather than receive lots of request in your inbox which you have to review and manually add the new contributors.
Create Your Own Group Boards
Why not start some of your own group boards on key topics in your blog’s niche? This is another great way to get people to notice you and your Pinterest account.
Start with one group board and invite people to collaborate on the board. Using your social channels is another great way to get people to discover your board, mention you have created this group board on your Facebook page or Instagram stories and invite people to join it!
Start Pinning To Group Boards
Now you are a member of a select set of group boards you can start pinning your content to them. Remember the following when you start pinning:
- Pin to your own boards first Pinterest prioritises the first pin so this should always be to one of your own boards.
- Follow the rules If you pin to the group board, re-pin content according to the rules of the board.
- Analyse board performance over time and leave boards that are not working for you.
AUTOMATION WITH TAILWIND
I already told you I love Pinterest because it brings lots of lovely readers to my blog every day. But what’s even better than that is that it can be automated, and whilst Pinterest is working hard for me every day, I don’t need to work hard on Pinterest every day!
- Pinterest, unlike Instagram, is one of the applications that has authorised partners that allow you to automate your strategy.
- Using paid tools such as Tailwind, Buffer or Hootsuite will help you to pin regularly and consistently across your own boards and to group boards.
- According to Tailwind, in the first six months of a brand-new Pinterest account – accounts that used their app reported the following:
- Were 3.6x more active;
- Gained 6x as many followers;
- Earned 11x times as many Re-pin’s;
- Earned 3x times as many Re-pin’s per Pin on average.
- In addition, since Pinterest is not a social channel you don’t need to be on the app / platform when you pin to engage with followers like you do on Instagram when you post an image.
- And Pinterest doesn’t penalize you for using a scheduler rather than manually pinning everything.
Tailwind Introduction
My preferred tool and in fact the only tool I use for scheduling to Pinterest is Tailwind.
- Tailwind is an approved partner with Pinterest.
- Tailwind provides you with a calendar to show the best times for you to pin and automatically allocates your pins into these slots for you.
- Pinterest doesn’t have a preference between you manually pinning or using an approved schedule like Tailwind.
- Tailwind Tribes can boost your reach even further, we will look at these next
- They offer great analytics about your pins and boards.
My only negative for Tailwind is that the site itself crashes regularly for me, and I can find that it takes some time to get the pins to be scheduled. I also have trouble shuffling the schedule once I have put all the pins on the schedule and most of the time that feature doesn’t work for me, but other than that I do like it!
Scheduling With Tailwind
Tailwind shows you a weekly pinning schedule, automatically telling you the best times to post.
You can select how often you want to pin per day. We mentioned 50 pins per day was the sweet spot, so simply select 50 and then Pinterest will create 50 time slots for you and automatically schedule and publish your content into the time slots.
If you have less content to pin because you are new to blogging then you can start with fewer pins per day, or pin your content plus other people’s content that you like and you think your followers would also like to get you to the 30-50 pins per day.
Pinterest Audit
Another great feature of Tailwind is that it offers a Pinterest audit for you, letting you know if anything is not set up correctly.
There is a handy tool that says complete your account, click on “see all suggestions” and here you will find recommendations, such as Pinterest boards that don’t have descriptions. I mentioned that having board descriptions is very important for Pinterest SEO so use Tailwind as a sense check for this and then go and tidy up and optimise the boards that are missing decsriptions.
Tailwind Tribes
Another great way to automate your strategy and get more repins of your content is to use Tailwind Tribes. In summary:
- Tailwind Tribes are a group of other pinners using Pinterest and Tailwind
- Each tribe will have specific themes or niches for the tribe e.g. travel, cooking, photography.
- You pin other tribe members content to your boards, and they pin yours to their boards increasing your reach and putting your content in front of their followers.
- You want to share your best and most relevant content to specific Tailwind Tribes.
- You should follow the rules of the Tribe.
- You can pin up to 30 pins to tribes per month, beyond that you need to upgrade your plan
- It’s simple and easy to find tribes within Tailwind and to pin to them as well as schedule to pin
- You can even create your own Tribe!
PINTEREST ANALYTICS
Pinterest analytics are a great way to get insight into what pins are getting repined, which boards are your most popular, who your audience is, which pins get the most clicks and so much more!
Analytics Requires A Business Account
To access your analytics, you must have a free business account set up. If you have not set up as a business account or converted your existing account to a business account do so now. Instructions for doing this are contained at the beginning of this article.
Overview Section – Analytics
Pinterest Analytics can be found in the top right in the navigation menu. This leads to a drop-down with two options Overview and Audience Insights. We begin with the Overview Section and will look at Audience Section later.
You can customize the analytics to view:
- View all – so no customizations made
- Specific date range
- Content-type: Organic or paid
- Claimed accounts: Pins that link to your claimed website or other channels
- Devices: Mobile, tablet or desktop
- Source: Your pins i.e. ones created and saved by you and other people pinning your content from your claimed site
Once you have set you customizations the analytics will show you:
- Impressions
- Total Audience
- Engagements
- Engaged audience
For each of these metrics, you can also see the % up or down versus the last period.
Metrics
On this page you can see total some important stats in the metrics box. In the graphic above this shows Total Impressions, but you can click on the Impressions drop down that appears above the graph to view totals or the rate for other statistics including:
- Engagements
- Close-Up’s
- Link Clicks
- Saves
This is important to look at so that you can see the % rates. For example, if you select the link click rate, the number that will appear in the Metrics box will be the average link click rate. Telling you how often your pins are being clicked on and taking pinners to your website to read the article that the pin relates to.
Top Pins
Next up you can look at your Top Pins in the period you have selected. Here you can see the top pins by impressions, engagements, close-ups, link clicks, and saves and then you can also see the source of the pin, so whether you pinned it or someone else pinned from your website or other channels.
What Are You Looking For?
When you are studying your analytics it’s great to have high impressions and high saves, but ultimately the goal is to be getting high CTR (click through rate) and having pinners click through to your website.
This means that Link clicks is one of the most important statistics to look at. Of course, saves will help this, but looking at which pins are getting saved and clicked on will help you understand which content your audience is most interested in so that you create more of it. It will also help you to understand what makes pinners click through.
For example, you may find the majority of your most clicked pins are ones where you have included an opt-in incentive and mentioned this on the Pinterest graphic. Further, you may then discover that the pins with an opt-in incentive that is an eBook on How To Grow Your Email List, are more popular than your pins with the opt incentive of 5 Free Lightroom Presets. This information helps you to understand what your audience wants so you can focus on creating more content which goes together with your most popular opt-in incentives.
Look for common features in your top pins to help you understand what to create in the future, or how to upgrade some of your pins to increase their popularity. It’s important to take this analysis and then work on the other content that may not be doing so well, for example:
- Great images or pin covers? Create more Pinterest covers like this in the future, and create new Pinterest covers for some of the less popular previously pinned content and re-pin this.
- Lengthy and keyword-rich descriptions? Go to the pins that are not doing so well and update the descriptions.
- Common Topics? Write more of this content in the future!
- Great content in the article itself Write more lengthy, informative content in the future.
Problem Solving
What do you do if you find you have the following problems?
Lots of saves, but not many clicks
- You need to incentivise the pinner to click through to your website. You could add a mention of a freebie download that they will get when they go to your website
- If it’s a product you are selling, make sure you have Product Pins (a feature of Rich Pins) turned on so that viewers can see the product pricing
- Change up your headings and titles to be more enticing and create some new Pinterest covers for your articles
Lots of clicks, but not many saves
- Add a call to action include details in the description and the image itself to tell users to save it.
Other Pinners Pinning Your Content
Customise the analytics view in the Sources section and toggle to Other Pins. This will show you the content that other people are pinning natively from your claimed website. By this we mean, a visitor has landed on your website, liked an article and wanted to save it for the future so they have pinned one or more of your images to their own Pinterest boards.
When you have toggled to Other Pins, you will see the same analytics for Top Pins as mentioned earlier. But now you can start to view this information with your web visitors in mind, rather than people finding your pins on Pinterest.
This is a piece of really valuable and important information to have. It shows you what content people are liking enough to save it for the future. It should be no surprise that some of the top pins will be ones from your most viewed articles.
- Now you can view these top pins by impressions, saves and link clicks and the analytics tells you how these pins perform on Pinterest through further re-pins and saves once that original pin has been made from your website.
- Use this to see which articles/images readers of your website want to save and create more content like this.
This is free traffic for you with no additional work! However, this shows you the importance of making sure that your website is Pinterest friendly for your web visitors. If you have not implemented the steps for making your blog Pinterest ready – go and do that now. Make sure you have a Pinterest Save button on your site, as well as clear Pinterest sharing buttons on all of your blog posts so that visitors can easily pin your content from the blog to their boards.
Audience Insights Section
To access your audience analytics, click on the drop-down is under the Analytics tab on the top left of the navigation menu.
In this section, you can discover more information about your own audience on Pinterest and all Pinterest users.
You have the option to customize the report to view your total audience, or your engaged audience – people interacting with your pins.
First, you can view the most popular categories and related interests for this audience. This will be broken down into several categories such as travel, quotes, women’s fashion.
From here you can click onto a specific category and get more information on the specific interests within this category. For example, if I select the travel category then the interests show me a list of different searches, ‘travel destinations’, ‘travel ideas’ ‘Europe destinations’. The affinity % tells us how much an audience is interested in this topic – and from here you can determine what content you should be created to match the audience’s interests.
Beneath the categories and interests section, you will find more demographic information about your audience.
- Their age
- Gender
- Location
- Devices they use
All Pinterest Users
You can view all this same information for all Pinterest audience, defined as ‘the total Pinterest audience is global and includes everyone who has seen or engaged with any Pins.’ This page of information gives you insight into what is the most popular content on Pinterest by category and interest.
The results show us that the most popular content on Pinterest is home décor. If you have a solo budget travel blog, creating home décor content just to get popular on Pinterest may not make sense, but it is still important to understand what users are interested in on this platform. There may be some ways for you to incorporate these popular categories into your blogs niche in the future.
Finally, you can compare the interests of your audience to the whole of Pinterest and see how they compare.
Thank you for reading! I hope that you found this article helpful to understand why you should be using Pinterest for your blog, how to set this up correctly and the methods for getting traffic to your blog from Pinterest.
If you have questions about Pinterest you can ask these to me and the community in our private Women’s Blogging Collective community
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