Pinterest Frequently Asked Questions

Hi welcome back, I’ve had a few weeks off as I needed a bit of downtime but I’m back and we’re talking about Pinterest. I get asked lots of questions about it, as it seems to be my favourite subject and definitely my favourite marketing tool. So thought chat through some of the questions I get most frequently.

Lets get straight on with the questions the first one is why is Pinterest so good for business?

So Pinterest is good for business because you can use it to build traffic to your website. You can use it to take your ideal customers from Pinterest over to your website. We know that pinners go there to shop 87% of them in a recent survey said that they were actually looking for something when they went to Pinterest and that something was something to buy. So even if the majority of the people that are pinning your pins are in America and you don’t pin because you’re listening in the UK, it’s still worthwhile being on Pinterest. This is for two reasons, those people that are pinning and looking in the UK are more likely to see you if you’re on there. They more likely to go to your website if they can see you on Pinterest, even though they’re not your main demographic because they are in a different country. Those people that are pinning in America are still going to have an impact on your traffic and that will still have an impact on your SEO reach, and that will still have an impact on your customers and who gets to see your website in the long run. Pinterest can be great for selling your product directly but it can also be great for improving your reach, but it can also be great for people seeing you and for your brand awareness. So I think Pinterest is really great marketing tool for business.

Next question is – What businesses work on Pinterest?

So I’d say pretty much most businesses can work on Pinterest and that’s for a number of reasons. We’ve just talked about how locality really isn’t a massive factor. So yes, you can get some customers from Pinterest that will directly go to your site and buy from you. What we’re trying to do is part of a bigger strategy, which is to build the traffic to your website so that your SEO rating goes up and that people who are looking to buy from your locality or within your shipping zones are going to find you. If you’re a service based business I’d say that Pinterest is perfect for you, you can pin your podcasts, your YouTube videos, your blog posts. You can kind of give that free value, by sharing lead magnets which get people to sign up to your mailing lists and really give people something that they’re looking for. Because people go to Pinterest to solve problems, to do DIY, to buy things. So if you’re going on their and pinning lead magnets that help people solve a problem, you’re going to be quite popular on Pinterest. If you’re a product based business I think brand awareness, product awareness, people finding your brand and creating traffic to your site, people buying from you, that does happen from Pinterest. So I think both types of business can do really well on Pinterest.

Should I be using it? Is the next question.

Now if you’ve listened to the podcast before or read anything I’ve written you know I don’t believe in should. I don’t think anyone should be thinking that their marketing has to be done like anybody else, I don’t think that people have to have the same strategies I think every business is unique I think every individual that runs that business is unique and just because somebody in your niche is on that particular platform doesn’t mean it’s going to be right for you. You have to decide for you. I think Pinterest is an amazing marketing tool and to some extent you don’t really need at to go heavy on other platforms if you’re really focusing on that one, but I really do believe that it’s all about what you can manage and what time you have. I don’t think that you should be doing everything on every platform because that is unachievable, unless you’ve got a huge team and you’re a massive business. You need to pick the things that work for your business and if you’re not sure if it’s going to work for you, drop me an email and I’ll happily talk to you about whether it would work for your business and whether it could be better, than some of the other things you are using.

So next question. When should I start pinning?

Basically, as soon as you decided to do it pin, pin everything that you have made before. So, if you have blog posts, if you have podcast episodes, if you have YouTube videos, if you have products, if you have anything, basically that you could create a pin for. Pin it immediately, now don’t pin the first things all in one go spread out the pinning, spread out your approach, otherwise you’re going to pin lots of stuff and then you’re going to run out of things to pin. So think about how you want to pin, come up with a strategy, think about how many times a month you’re going to create content so macro content things like blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos and think about how many pins you want to make, for those pieces of content and how many times a week you’re going to do that and how many times a day you’re going to do that and come up with a basic strategy. That will help you to achieve something that is manageable for you.

What’s the most important thing when you start pinning? I think it is to make sure you’ve got a good board structure, that you have an account this optimised. I have a guide on doing that on the blog if you want to know how to do that. And that you are thinking about what strategy is going to work for you, there’s no point saying I’m going to pin 500 pins a week if you just can’t do that. That’s just going to make Pinterest think that you’re spamming, because you pin loads and then none. Go with something that you can achieve first and build up.

Next question should you only pin from your niche?

Yes is the answer to this but there are some examples where you could deviate slightly off. So for instance if you were a wedding photographer and you pinned lots of wedding photography images, you could also really go wider into the wedding area and you could have boards that would attract brides, grooms, people who are getting married, people who are just looking for inspiration in general to your account through those boards. So, I think pinning for your niece’s great and I think that, that is going to help Pinterest to know what kind of pinner and what kind of business you are and what kind of content you’re going to be sharing. It helps them to make sure your content gets seen by the right people, if you have a consistency with that approach.

But I do think that you can go a bit wider. For instance I could pin things about social media, I could pin things about strategy and I might pin things about bloggers or I might pin things about how to write the best sales copy. Now they’re not necessarily in my niche of my business some of those things, but they work with what I’m doing so it would work for my Pinterest account.

I think the most important thing to say here is, if that you’re pinning things that are within your niche but also pinning things that are just outside of it and we’re talking like you know a small amount outside of those lines, do it on a consistent basis. So every week or every couple of weeks make sure you’re pinning that outside of your niche content, so that Pinterest sees that this is not a fluke pin. It’s just a oh yeah this person does pin around outside of this niche.

How long does it take to see growth how?

This is the question I get asked all the time. If you’ve got a brand new account I would say it’s going to take six to nine months to get any real success. You often get a really quick win success, where you have really good look, at really good take on your figures. So you’re reach is good, your engagement levels are good, your monthly unique views are good for a bit and then it will drop. And this is the pattern I always see, accounts doing really well initially, they drop off a little bit, and then when you hit that six to nine months of consistent pinning and working towards a strategy it will start to steadily grow again.

People will see different results, it’s really not something you can game, you cannot say this is 100% going to work for everybody because it’s not always that simple. But if you are showing up and you are pinning on a consistent basis, and sticking to those kind of guidelines we talked about within your niche, you’re doing what is seen as good pinning by Pinterest you will grow. It might be quicker than six months, it might be longer but it will grow. Pinterest wants people pinning and if you are consistent regular pin are they going to love you

What is my top tip for growth?

It’s really simple and it’s really dull the same for every platform keep doing it and be consistent. I think Pinterest more than any of the platform loves consistency. It doesn’t like it if you drop off. So if you’re using a scheduler and you get to a point where you have no pins left and then doesn’t pin anything for a couple of days, it will kind of not be very happy with you. So I really make sure that you are doing a consistent approach depending. That is my top, top tip.

Should I be using group boards?

Now, this is another yes but or yes or no answer. I haven’t used group boards personally. I’ve read lots of different things by it. I can see the benefits of them and I’ve heard from people who have seen good benefits from them but I’ve also heard the negatives and for me the negatives outweigh the positives I’ve heard.

So, I’ve heard of accounts getting suspended because someone within that group did something not quite right. I’ve heard of reach being affected because someone in that group board is pinning different stuff and its set a signal to Pinterest that you’ve gone off your normal content.

So, great boards can be really good and if you’ve had a good experience then brilliant, you know, don’t change them on this advice necessarily. Think about, if you’re going to venture into it, my advice would be think about who you’re doing that board with. Do you know them? Can you trust them not to do spamming pinning? And think about the type of content that’s pinned. Does it really fit in your niche? So, that would be my tips on group boards.

How do I measure success of my pins?

This is another top question I get quite a lot. So, Pinterest has its own analytics in the business end. If you haven’t switched your business account do it straight away, it doesn’t have any impact on your account other than you get analytics and a few other features. So, do that straight away and there will be things you can see in there. It’s actually changed a bit recently so it’s actually quite nice easy to use area. You can look in Google Analytics for referral traffic and find out where your traffic is coming from and your scheduler. So, if you’re using a scheduler to send your pins to Pinterest then they will have in built analytics within them.

Are Followers important?

This is another yes or no question. Followers are important to some extent. It’s not like Instagram, where you improve your reach, your engagement with your followers. It is more to do with people repinning your pin. So if you have a group of people who are active followers and they always repin your pins then you’ll find that has really good effect on your general account. You might have a lot of people that are just dormant followers and they’re not going to have an impact on your account at all, pretty much like any other platform that you might use. But on Pinterest followers only really mean anything when it comes to repins and when it comes to working with other brands. So it’s kind of a vanity figure for other brands or for clients or for if you’re going to work as an influencer. For instance they can see that you have a following and that’s what that means for that kind of business. But for the small business, for the other people that are using it I think that followers can be really important and they can help but don’t get too caught up on that.

My monthly unique views have dropped what’s going on?

This is the top questions get all the time and you may have noticed that since the pandemic and the various lockdowns have happened around the world that Pinterest has had some surges in pinners and some drops in engagement and drops in reach. I’ve certainly noticed it on accounts I’m working with. And monthly unique views seems to have been affected. One account I’m on hasn’t gone up at all and one account I have has completely tanked for no reason that I can see. So it’s not really a very reliable statistic is all I’m going to say to you.

It doesn’t really mean anything, it means how far your pin has been shared. Not how it’s been engaged with, repined, interacted with, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s just about where it’s gone. If you get engagement on one pin that has gone very far then obviously She’s going to do better than one that hasn’t got as far but you could get more engagement so it’s kind of one of those figures that’s not that important it looks good to outsiders basically the brands to other people but don’t get hung up on it

Okay and the final question is why do you love Pinterest?

so I actually just think Pinterest is a great place, it’s so positive. There’s no pressure in Pinterest and I think as a business owner we spend so much time marketing in our business in areas where we’re trying to grow all the time. It’s competitive, in a friendly way, but it’s competitive and you try to do all these different features and all these different things that you need to do. And with Pinterest is pretty simple, you write a good description you send your pin live and you keep doing that. There’s not that much more to it, there’s a few other things, obviously that you can get into but if you do those things you will see really good growth.

So, it’s really nice place to hang out in, also people go there with really positive intentions. They go there to find things they want to do, they go there to find hobbies, they go there to find things they might want to buy, that diy projects. There’s a lot of good that comes into the Pinterest platform and I find that really inspiring.

I think that it’s really wonderful tool for a small business to build traffic to their website. It’s one of the best things you can do, other than paying for links and improving your domain authority. Pinterest is going be right up there for me when it comes to traffic building and improving your website.

It’s so beautiful to look at. If your feed’s really nice and you’ve kind of narrowed down the things that you follow and pin you get lots of things that you’re interested in as well. So even if you’re doing it for your business it’s a nice place to spend time because everything you see is quite inspiring. I never find it hard to find other people’s pins to pin on to my boards.

So that’s the end of the questions, the takeaway this week is, to get onto Pinterest, if it’s right for business of course, there’s no should here remember, use it consistently and enjoy it, just go there and kind of turn up and enjoy, it is a positive platform, as I said.

I hope you found that useful if you want to chat some more get in touch, my details are in the show notes I’m here to help.