Do you feel frustrated with Pinterest and all the latest changes and updates they’ve made? If you do you’re most certainly not alone.
If you’ve been using Pinterest for marketing then you’ll likely know that around March 2020 Pinterest gave us the heads up that they would start prioritizing fresh pins in the algorithm.
They also talked about the new best practices which were all meant to reduce the amount of repins and increase the number of fresh pins on the platform.
As if 2020 hasn’t been hard enough. Just when you think you got the hang of this pinning thing, Pinterest goes and changes all the rules. To make things worse, the new rules aren’t so clear either.
Let’s have a look at some of the most important but not so clear guidelines Pinterest has given us and try to decipher what they actually mean.
What does Pinterest actually mean by ‘Fresh’?
So we need to ask ourselves ‘are they talking about fresh content?’ – The answer to this is yes (and no), it’s always great to create new content for SEO purposes as well as for Pinterest.
But the fact of the matter is that if the content you have hasn’t ever been pinned to Pinterest then it’s considered ‘fresh’ in Pinterest’s eyes. It doesn’t have to be brand new content. As long as it’s never been pinned then you’re good to go.
Does it have to be a new pin leading to a new URL or can it be the same URLs but a different picture and text?
Although a new pin and a new URL is the ideal meaning of fresh, you can absolutely create a new pin with a different picture and new text.
This is considered a fresh pin on Pinterest. But whereas once you could put this pin on a number of different boards and each one would be considered fresh, nowadays the first board you pin it to is the ‘fresh pin’. After that they are considered repins.
Is pinning on different boards considered ‘fresh pins’? And what about Tailwind tribes and smart loops, how does that play out now?
To be truthful the answer at this time is not entirely clear. Pinning the same pin on to different boards is not considered ‘fresh’.
But if this is true then the days of Tailwind are over because we won’t need them anymore.
I think it would be a good idea to hang on to Tailwind and keep repinning with at least a week’s interval to different boards, but no more than five different boards.
This is what I’m doing in the meantime until Pinterest says otherwise regarding Tailwind, which incidentally is one of Pinterest’s ‘trusted partners’.
How many boards should I pin my new pin design to?
Tailwind still keeps 10 boards in the list as the max allowed a number of boards for repins with intervals.
Pinterest now indirectly lets content creators know about their best practices through the spam safeguard feature in Tailwind who is their authorized partner.
Even though 10 is still the max allowed a number of boards, I would start reducing the number of repins to about 5 boards, as apparently these repins will be less and less effective over time.
If you save your pin to 4 more boards that have related but different keywords in the title, you’ll give your pin a chance to rank for additional keywords, regardless of the pin is considered fresh or not.
Is Tailwind still worthwhile using?
At this time (Oct. 2020) Tailwind is still an official Pinterest partner and it doesn’t look like Pinterest treats TW pins any different from the ones saved or scheduled with the Pinterest native scheduler.
But you still need to use Tailwind in the right way and abide by the best practices in order to avoid Pinterest’s very relentless spam filters. So it’s more a case of how you use this tool rather than if the tool is worthwhile using.
What can I do if I’m following all the best practices but my numbers still keep going down?
At this point, I would say to keep on keeping on, at least for the next 3 months stick to a strategy that makes sense and is within the new guidelines. Don’t keep chopping and changing your strategy or else you’ll never understand what works and what doesn’t.
Don’t forget that all those beautiful new pins you’re making might not be under the spotlight right now but they have every chance of being seen in the near future if you’ve done your KW research for the pin description correctly. And they will be searched for indefinitely.
Pinterest is having a kind of midlife crisis and is making some serious algorithm changes that may have affected your account, but these changes as frustrating as they are maybe only temporary and your numbers may very well come back up once the dust has settled.
Also going down the line I expect Pinterest to be more clear on what they are looking for from us content creators once they’ve figured it out themselves.
I believe that some of this confusion has been done somewhat on purpose in order to entice us to buy ads and “pay to play” so to speak, especially as Pinterest has gone public and has pressure from shareholders to make more money. But at the end of the day, Pinterest needs content creators and pin creators in order to keep its platform fresh and interesting.
So bottom line, it’s not easy to put all that effort in and not see immediate returns but if you can keep up with the platform changes (more or less) and not let the recent updates ruffle your feathers too much then you will benefit from extra traffic, leads and income probably sooner rather than later.
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