467: Pinterest Strategy in 2024 Q&A with Kate Ahl

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This episode kicks off what we are calling our Summer Membership Spotlight the last week of each month this summer. So for June, July and August we will be highlighting a piece of content that is normally a members only piece of content for Food Blogger Pro members. We host monthly live Q&As for our food Blogger Pro members and Bjork also conducts monthly coaching calls with Food Blogger Pro members to help help them work through two or three of their current questions and concerns when it comes to being a food creator. Like I said, normally these things are only available for Food Blogger Pro members to either watch live tune into the video replay on our site or to listen to on Food Blogger Pro on the Go, which is our members only podcast. But we're going to be highlighting three pieces of this content for all of our podcast listeners this summer just to give you an idea of what goes on inside the Food Blogger Pro membership and in hopes that maybe you will decide you would like to join us. We're kicking off the series with a replay of our live Q and A with Kate all, who is the Fublogger pro Pinterest expert and also the owner of simplepin Media. In this Q and A, Bjork and Kate chat about all things Pinterest strategy in 2024, including what constitutes a fresh pin, the difference in performance between video pins and static pins, scheduling on Pinterest, the importance of branding, and just really everything you need to know about Pinterest and how to have success on Pinterest in this day and age. It's an awesome live Q and A. We really enjoyed attending it Live members submitted tons of interesting questions and we're excited to share it with you today. So without further ado, I'll let Bjork and Kate take it away.

We are officially live. We'll start to see people trickling in here and joining us as we're going to have a conversation today around all things Pinterest. Super excited to be talking to Kate from simplepin Media. We see Annette's here, Jennifer's here, Katie's coming in. Katie Keck, good to see you. Jocelyn is joining and yeah, the focus today is going to be on Pinterest. The exciting thing here, Kate, you and I were just talking about kind of this interesting, you know, evolution of a platform. And for you and I, we've been in the world of content creation and social media platforms for you, you know, obviously a focus on Pinterest. And once you are in it for like a decade or a decade plus, you see the ebbs and flows. And one of the things that's really interesting with Pinterest is there is this season where it was like a mega traffic source generator. And it was like, you know, you'd see it right up there with Google search. And then some things happened and it shifted and it kind of became less effective as a traffic source. And now we're kind of seeing people as Google becomes a little bit more unstable and you know, people see kind of the risk of going all in on a single platform saying like, hey, what does it look like to come back to Pinterest and be strategic with that as a platform? So tell me, just like from a timeline perspective, as long as you've been in Pinterest, could you kind of pinpoint some significant kind of changes along the way and what that's been like to track with those?

Yeah, a hundred percent. And you're right on. As you talk about it, it's like, 2014, we had the smart feed. 2017, we had a big rise in traffic, but then we had this introduction of kind of a few shopping integrations, some ads. So you saw a dip in traffic. Then you see it kind of go back up in 2019. And then 2020, we get this explosion in users, like doubling users. People are at home. And 2020, it was like people were getting traffic who hadn't even used Pinterest before. They're like, where is this coming from? And then late 2020, or probably early 21, they see the introduction of idea pins and story pins, and content creators are like, wait, these don't link. Which is a main frustration of the Pinterest user. So you kind of see a lot of creators leave, but you also see user frustration. And then early 2020, say, okay, we're going to link. We're going to do away with like a creator program that we had. And we are going to introduce just this pin format that's like video. Right. It's not going to be called idea pin. It's just you pin a pin, it's either a static image or a video. And I think at that point we saw, I guess, traffic stagnated. And you, you had the switch in the CEO. They moved away from their old one into a new one in summer of 2022, which was actually really great because he's a little more aggressive. And now we see traffic going back up for people. And I think we're not the way we saw in 2020, but. And I think that's the way it goes. Right? Like what we saw in 2017, 2019, like, those numbers are gone. Right? They're gone for everybody. It's not like we can go back to that. So, yeah, definitely the wave. And you're right, people are nervous about Google, so they're going to what feels like Google. Well, Pinterest. Right. So let's invest in it again.

Yeah. Can you talk about the. It's interesting to hear kind of a platform try a thing. You see this often and then kind of step back from it. The. The idea pins, like, what were those? What did that look like? And then now they. There's video pins. What does. What does like a clickable link look like within the context of Pinterest now? And then, if you could also talk about, like, what were they trying to do during that stage where they're testing out some of these more like almost like Instagram reels kind of type content.

Yeah. I think what they were seeing too is right at the height of 2020. So they saw this massive user growth and they saw the massive growth on Tick Tock and they said, how do we keep people on the platform longer? Because that will bring advertisers to our platform and we can show them the time spent on platform. But the problem that Pinterest has was that their users were used to clicking on something and going away from the platform. And their biggest frustration was a broken link. So now you' added in an element of frustration to the user and the creator and it just wasn't working. It was meant to be this thing that was like a hybrid of a reel slash story, slash TikTok. Right. Well, once they got a year in, they realized, oh, we're trying to. We're trying to pay creators to do this. We're trying to also make it work and it's just not working. So then they added the link at that point with the hope of, okay, now we're going to remove the frustration. But still, what we want is this way for people to create on the platform. We want everybody to be able to express themselves. And this is a great way to do it without a website. I think that's what they were kind of originally thinking without the link, but then they realized that just wasn't going to work. So they still have short form video. That's kind of what we're leaning towards. And they've been super indecisive this year. Like, I lost idea pins a year ago and then I had them back like three months ago and now I don't have them, so.

Oh, interesting.

Because of that discrepancy, we tell people, just think of it as short form video. Like, don't assign the term idea pin anymore. You might see it, you might not see it. Pinterest also introduced collages. So these collages were a way, let's say you're designing a kitchen. It was a way for you to take cutouts and pictures and kind of put them into a static image collage. And so that's really more of a user tool, not so much like a marketing tool. But you'll see that now today it says, do you want to add a pin, a collage or a board? Those are kind of your only three options.

Sure. The pin. For a user, they would say pin, collage or board. Yep, a board. Yeah, that's great. And then one last question on my end before we jump into some of the questions from folks who have submitted these ahead of time. What are you seeing that's working well? Now on Pinterest. So if you are a publisher, you're creating content, you're putting it onto your site. There's a lot of things that are have worked well. Do those same things still work well? Are there new things that we should be considering as publishers or creators that are working well on Pinterest? Like what are the things that. And by work? Well, I guess it could either mean it helps you grow your Pinterest followers or it could also mean that you're getting traffic to your site from it.

Right. Well, I'll say first, like one of the biggest metrics is saves. Like Pinterest really looks to those to say, okay, the more saves something gets, the more we distribute it, the more you have an opportunity to get traffic. Right. So as far as what's working well, I'll say even for me, like our traffic has dipped a lot in the last couple months. So we're trying a lot of different things. But one of the clients we looked at, they're side by side the same niche. Creating content probably weekly or biweekly is the best. We've noticed that content creators, which makes so much sense, who slow down on content and maybe create one piece of content a month or every six weeks, they are slowing in their traffic. So keeping up that content creation on your website is important. I think a lot of people, which I saw this question come through, create fresh pins. I'll talk about that when we get to that question and assume it will replace content. It's not. That is just not really working well.

Point being the difference between like a new pin versus a new actual piece of content on your site, correct?

Yes, exactly. That's those people's numbers are doing really well. I'll say too updating some for keywords. Pinterest does do updates on their keywords just like Google does. So if you have not changed up the name of a board, if you haven't searched it to see like, oh, is this vegan breakfast board still really good or do I need to change the name? At a conference I just went to, there's a lot of conversation around vegan plant based. You know, like are people searching plant based or are they searching vegan now? So pay attention to the differences in that. And people who are changing up their board names, making them, refreshing them are definitely seeing growth. And then videos hit or miss. Right now video was doing really good, I think post the change from idea pins to short form video. But it's. I don't know, some were doing great before and now they're not doing as well. So I think static pins for sure. Just a static image. They call them standard pins. Those are still doing well for people. So I would say those are the three things that we're seeing.

Awesome. So we have a handful of people who are tuning in live. It's always fun to have some folks who are tuning in live. If you have questions as we go through this stuff for Kate, you can go ahead and ask it in the questions area for zoom. I would also be interested for anybody who's listening in live and at their keyboard. Sometimes people have it on in the background and they're doing something. But who you are, where you're tuning in from, maybe what your site is. And then I'd also be interested in how long you've been a creator, how long have you been publishing content? All of us have been at this for a different amount of time. It could be decades, it could be months. So it's always just interesting to hear from folks who have been, you know, in the. In it for a long time, and also from folks who are just, you know, new to this and learning as they go. So you can go ahead and do that in the chat area. Make sure you switch it over to everyone as opposed to the hosts and panelists. So everybody can see that as we kick things off here. And let's start with the one that you had referenced, Kate, where you said laura is asking what constitutes a fresh pin.

Yeah. So, okay. When Pinterest kind of used this state this word first or phrase first, it was in 2019. And what they were trying to get people to consider was that looking at a pin, looking at an image in a new way. So one of the examples that I use is taking a new image from an event or a holiday. Let's say you have a cinnamon roll recipe and you've had it on Pinterest forever, creating a new image for it with maybe something that is a different, not just a different angle or moving a line. We heard from a lot of people recently that were like, well, I just swapped the image. Think of it as changing up the text, even making this for your next Mother's Day or making this for Sunday br. Trying to really create something that is different and new and using keywords that are different on that image. That is what we see as a totally new, fresh image. And you don't have to go crazy, like, you don't have to create 25 of them. But we did in looking at our clients and seeing the side by side in the same Niche. One of the clients was definitely optimizing seasonally for her images, so she had her standard ones. But she was getting crafty and creative to spin the image towards a holiday, whether it's colors or adding certain things. A lot of the things I saw with food images that I was reviewing a couple weeks ago was that they are all looking kind of similar. So look around and look different. Like add a border around the outside. You know, I was actually thinking about this the other day when Lindsay created different images for Pinch of Yum years ago. And I think it was the stack, it was the longer one, and people were like, oh, it's so cool. And she was getting great engagement. It was because she thought outside the box. And so I really want people to be encouraged to think about fresh images, not just as moving a line or flipping your image. Think about how to really optimize it. You're taking the time to do it, do it actually different and search some keywords too, as well that you might add to it.

That's great. Yeah. I think of this idea of it's always like, drill down to what is the reason why it's working. It's not working because you move a block of text and then you trick Pinterest into thinking, hey, this is like a fresh image. The reason it's working is because it's like a new, novel, unique thing. And what as a platform, my guess is what Pinterest is always trying to get at is this idea that we want new, fresh, novel pieces of content. Like you said before, the best way to do that is to actually publish a new piece of content on your site. Create a really engaging image from that. But if not that, what I'm hearing you saying is another really great thing you can do is off of that piece of content, create a new, unique, interesting image that links back to that piece of content. Second best to just creating an actual new piece of content with a great image that goes with it. Does that feel accurate?

Yeah, 100% accurate. And I think one of the things that people got caught up in is you play to the algorithm instead of play to the people, play to the people. And you also hit the algorithm. And so take. If you need new Pinterest templates, go grab them from somebody, go buy them. There's tons of them out there. Change up what you're doing, get out of the rut that you've been in instead. I heard a trick of it was a really interesting hack that somebody was like uploading everything to Tailwind and then Moving a line. And I was like, wait a minute, you're missing it.

Yeah, you missed the point.

Yeah, missed the point. And I think it's almost like you're getting more power, more bang for your buck. When you do take that 15 to 20 minutes and look at those keywords change up to make it seasonal. And that could come back for you next year, too. And I think that's just something that people are definitely. They're missing the boat on that.

Yeah. It's. With any of the things that we do, the best place to start is always with the user. Because any of these platforms, what they're trying to do is create the best experience for the user. And so as much as possible, if you kind of, when you first are thinking about it, skip the platform, think of the user, and then think of the platform. And these are some of the conversations that we're having today. Like, what are the technical elements to consider? What's working well now, you know, what are the considerations? I should make what's not working well and then take those into consideration. But always starting with the user as opposed to, like, the platform.

Yeah. One of the tips I gave somebody there that I was meeting with, I'm like, think about it. The cook at home probably has their iPad open. They have the recipe out. They're cooking back and forth. Why don't you take a picture or a flat lay, have your iPad on the counter and then put the image of your recipe in that. Like, that's different, but it's connecting. Like, that's how I cook from Pinterest. Interest is I'm looking at the recipe right there. Do that.

Yep. And being creative as it's what we do, we're creators. Like, how do you be creative and unique and novel? That's great. It's fun to hear from some folks. Shannon at the Recipe Necessity. Carol Yu. Good to see you, Carol. She says she's been blogging since 2018. Off and on now focused on blogging in person, teaching cozymeal.com food classes. Jocelyn from Jas Mahal in Chicago has been blogging for five years. Shannon's been a member since 2022. Started in 2020. We also have some folks who've been at it for a while here. Lauren's been blogging since 2012. Marissa has been publishing for 10 years. Katie Keck, good to see you. Lots of folks tuning in. A lot of good questions here and we're going to keep moving through them. So Rachel is asking, are hashtags still relevant on Pinterest? What are your thoughts on that?

That this is a funny one because it's like a hill I want to die on. But I'm sure that the moment I die on this hill, Pinterest is going to change. So they have been a no for a long time, but there's been a recent introduction and I think Pinterest is using the Chat GPT API to start to, like, add automated suggestions for your Pinterest description. Now, it's not available for everybody. We have a few clients that have it, but I don't have it yet. You start typing and all of a sudden it will populate a description for you and it includes hashtags. This led some people to believe, oh, Pinterest is using hashtags. But we think because of the API that's connected, Chat GPT does use hashtags still when you write Pinterest descriptions, when you ask it to. So what I would say is, I go back to. The user never searches with a hashtag. The user never clicks on a hashtag. It is just not in their the way that they use it. And if anybody here is a Pinterest user, you know the same thing. You don't put hashtag, you put a phrase or you put a word. So in that sense, we tell people, leave them off. There really is no value that we see that a hashtag holds greater importance than an actual keyword. So our suggestion is just ignore them for now. Because Pinterest, we've been asking them to in so many places where you please just tell us what your belief is. And they just haven't so, sure, I'll die in that hill today. Don't use them.

All right, and what you're saying is, if you get this, like, automated, you know, description generator, they're including hashtags, which probably led some people to believe, Wait, Pinterest thinks we should include these. But what you're saying is, chances are they're using a tool, and that tool is trained on previous existing data sets, and those previously existing data sets had hashtags. That doesn't necessarily mean it's best practice today. It just means the tool was trained on old content, which maybe had hashtags, therefore it then uses those. But as a user of Pinterest, most people aren't using hashtags as a part of their strategy.

Right. And also, I'll note too, I don't know if I would trust it totally yet to give me the right keywords as well. So if you want to test and play around with it how it Works is if you just simply upload an image, it will give you a description automatically. That's how we've seen it work. So do that and then pin it to a secret board, nobody sees it, and then go double check. Are those keywords even matching up in the search bar on Pinterest as search prediction? Because I don't know. I don't quite trust it yet.

Yep, that makes sense. Great. You kind of alluded to this a little bit, but Sarah's asking, have you seen any difference in performance between video versus static pins? So just maybe a real quick recap of kind of the difference between those two. And then if you've seen a performance difference between video and static.

Yeah, we have actually, as of late, video seem to do really well in 2023. But the first couple months of 24, we really see it lagging. In fact, my team was like, have you guys seen video performing less than. Getting less views than it was before? So it seems to be there's a big switch. So basically, video on Pinterest, less than a minute. Very buzzy, kind of just A.D. like, if you will, for whatever you want them to go to. And those were doing pretty well when they would show maybe a recipe. Here's the five things that you need. Here's a quick buzz through. Go, you know, learn more. But as of late, I don't know, they seem to be getting not as many views as a standard static image. So we tell people, if you're seeing that, go back to like 80% of standard images. Make that the bulk of what you're pinning to Pinterest, but keep leaking out videos. Keep trying that and see if they kind of come back up.

Yeah, and that's one of the interesting things with Pinterest. I was having a conversation with somebody who's in the gardening space, and he was saying they did this huge Pinterest initiative and, like, tried all this stuff, and they're like, we're just not seeing traction there. And then a year later is when they started to really see the benefit of it. So can you kind of speak to the difference? Maybe relates to search a little bit too, but it's so different than a platform like Facebook or Instagram in terms of the immediacy of Takes a while for stuff to come around, and it lives. It has a different life than other social platforms. So can you talk to that a little bit?

Yeah, they say the shelf life is four months, but I actually think it's even longer than that. Because when you get on Pinterest a common thing that we've heard too. We're not just seeing any movement, but we tell people when they're new to Pinterest to give it six to nine months to really see the growth. It is a platform that does not have any dopamine hits, so you're going to feel like it's not working. But because it takes a while for Pinterest to recognize the keywords, recognize the engagement, it takes time. Plus, seasonality is a big, big deal. So if this person who's in gardening starts at in the fall, that's when people are kind of closing up their gardens. They're not really searching. But if they were to start this time of year, then people might have been searching more for that type of content. But even if they didn't, now, this year they're seeing that those results, that growth. And a lot of people will tell me, man, that old Pinterest pin, it's still bringing me traffic. That's amazing. Like, you make sure that, like that post is optimized, you're creating those. That's where you want to create new, fresh images is for the post that's doing really well. Spin it to be seasonal, spin it to be any keywords that are new. So, yeah, it is going to take time. And I saw there were some people in the comments that said they were new and it felt confusing. That is totally normal. At the beginning of starting to figure out Pinterest marketing, one of the best things is just to open up your app and play around with it, see how you respond to pins or how it affects you. That makes you a better marketer. So testing and trying. But yeah, it does take a while, but once it gets going, I mean, it keeps delivering traffic.

That's great. What was, what changed? You know, you talked about the history of Pinterest. What changed from the time when, let's say it was peak traffic to now? Is there a way that they're linking differently? Does the URL show up in a different place? How did that shift happen? Because it's still an important traffic source. You know, in terms of social media platforms, it's like Instagram and Pinterest for Pinch of Yum are kind of the two important platforms for us. But at one point it was like, I don't know what it would be, but it was like, you know, Google and then Pinterest really close behind from a traffic source. Now there's a wider gap for us. It's not true for everybody. But was there something that changed about the Interface or how they linked. What did that look like?

Yeah, I think the Height was really 20, 17, 18, 19. It was like just doing really great. And then with 2020, when they made all those changes with idea pins, not having links with really trying to figure out how to keep people on the platform longer. Shopping integrations, I think all of that came together and Pinterest said we need to be profitable and the way to be profitable is to drive advertisers towards us. The problem was is their organic side and their ad side. It was like the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. So even when we were leaning into, okay, let's try ads, the ads people didn't really understand the ecosystem of how the organic works. So I think they had a little bit of like a sales problem too. Sure. And I think what we saw with Facebook, you know, in 2013, when they went into ads, they were like, pull the lever, we're done. Right.

Yep. I think we're done with sending organic traffic or pages. So you had a page, it had 500,000 followers. You could post an update and get tens of thousands of people visiting that day just from that post. And for. It was literally, I think, a switch that went on and people were waiting for it and then it happened and then they're like, shoot, now I can no longer send traffic.

Totally. And it was like overnight. Right. And you, in all the communities, people were like, did yours get shut off? Did yours get shut off? I think Pinterest went a little slower on that spigot and that's what we've seen over the last couple of years. And I think the pandemic threw them for a loop. I think the previous CEO moved really slowly. This new CEO is from Google, Venmo, PayPal, really into shopping integrations. So I think Pinterest is still going to hold steady. Like we're still going to see this like current traffic piece. But that's when I just think they haven't been as aggressive with turning off the organic piece. And also they're not a platform that people think, well, one, they're not considered a social media platform. Two, people don't get rid of it when they're doing a social media detox. And three, people don't do doom scrolling. They only visit the platform maybe once a day or every other day. So their user behavior is so different. So I think Pinterest is real hesitant to turn a lot of that off.

Yeah. And it's such an important platform. Well, it seems like the for People in our space, like food creators, the way that they are transacting with interest is we will feed content, and the hope is that we get traffic from that. Like, yeah, the expectation for that never existed for a platform like Instagram. And so the transaction there is we will give content to Instagram in exchange for selling a product, doing sponsored content, maybe directing people to an email signup. And so the exchange looks different. My guess is Pinterest probably has some incentive to keep that there, that. That being traffic, in order to continue to appease people who are creators. A really important piece of the puzzle for them to get new content onto their platform.

Yeah, for sure.

So this question is coming in from Cam says, hi, Kate. Should we limit the number of pins that link back to a single blog post or URL?

No, we've never actually had that issue or worry because if you think about it, like, if you get a lot of people coming to your site one day and they all want to save it for later, you could have, you know, a super viral post and tons of people save it. That's actually not a problem. And Pinterest likes that, actually. But don't. Don't do it yourself. Don't take that as like, okay, I'll pin a ton of. Let the people pin for you. But just know that that could. You don't want to do your pinning back to back to back to back. But Pinterest recognizes a user behavior different than coming from, like, the same ip.

And so let's say it's somebody posting like, Pinch of Yum publishes a new recipe. How many pins should we, as the Pinch of Yum Pinterest account, create that point back to that recipe.

Yeah. So we recommend, especially for food, you can do a little bit more because you have different shots, you have different process. So you can do five or six if you really need to. You don't have to put those all in your post, but you can kind of do different angles, test different things out. For me. And B2B, I only do one to two for each of mine just because you can't really angle that up differently. So you can do. Yeah, probably five to 10 if you really want to. And then you can drip those out, you know, onto different boards over time and then just let them sit. Right. Don't, like, share them again. Just see what they do out there once they get out. Great.

Marco's asking, how do I turn high engagement into followers? So let's say you have some pins. They're getting a lot of traction, but you Want to make sure that the traction an individual pin gets converts into Pinterest followers. And maybe a second question after that is like, how valuable is it to have Pinterest followers?

Yeah, it's not valuable at all. I would say it's probably one of the metrics that, like, we were just actually doing a deep dive on this. We were getting kind of geeky about it. Looking at does the number of followers translate to that monthly view number? Now, for a long time I would throw out that monthly view number, but I actually am getting more curious about it. Like, what is it telling me? It definitely is not telling me about a conversion, but what it is telling me is that people with a low number of followers can get a really good level of engagement. That's what that monthly viewer number. It's kind of like a melting pot of all the numbers. And people with a higher number of followers can get a lower number of engagement. So we don't see any correlation that says more followers equals more traffic, more engagement, more saves. What we see is individual pins carrying the majority of the weight. And that is where we want to put most of our energy. Because Pinterest, it's kind of. You don't get calls to action to follow people very often. And like I said, it does not translate into the a good health of an account. I've seen people with 200, 300,000 followers that have a lower monthly view number than somebody with like 6000 followers who has a higher. So that being said, I don't focus on followers, like at all.

Yeah. And there's been a shift in every social platform and would be interested if this resonates with you as you think about Pinterest away from like a social algorithm. I follow you and therefore I'll show you more of this content to a content algorithm which says, I think that you're interested in this based on your behavior. And so regardless if you follow this person or not, I'm going to show you what I believe. This is the algorithm talking. I'm going to show you what I believe to be the best piece of content for you at this given moment. Doesn't matter if you follow somebody or not. This is what I'm going to surface for you. Does that feel accurate as to what you're doing?

Yeah, that's what they call their smart feed. So what everybody should do is go onto Pinterest and search something. So my daughter's going to Europe in the fall and we're searching for this particular country in Europe. The moment I search that and I go back to my home feed. It's fill, it's pepper note filled, but it's peppered with those pieces. So search and just see what happens. Because that's what Pinterest is interested in. Like, oh, bjork, you're looking up, like barbecue recipes. Let me show you some. But you might not follow that person. But they're looking at what's already getting the most engagement and what matches up with your search term. Like, they just don't want to show you. Like, maybe you searched brisket, they're not interested in showing you ribs, they're now going to show you brisket. And that's where these key indicators come from and why we use keywords and why we play around with new keywords on our fresh pin images. Because that's what Pinterest is taking into consideration. Oh, where is it that I can find something that serves this user that then keeps them around longer? Because they don't want to create a smart feed that's like, you know, boring? And they have this cool feature too that let's say you had a wedding and you're married and you're not planning your wedding anymore. You can go into your settings as a user and turn off. I don't want to see anything more about weddings.

Oh, interesting.

That's a pretty cool thing that they have for people. I like that feature. So, yeah, that's why followers don't really matter.

That's great. And I think for anybody just starting out, it's reassuring because then what does matter is the, like, solid, individual piece of content that you're creating. It's compelling. Is it interesting, like you said, Is it unique, new and novel? Does it capture somebody's kind of interest? And do they click on it? Do they save it? Like all of those being things that are important in the equation as opposed to, like, you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers.

Yeah. Can I give this quick tip really quick? I was going to mention it earlier and I forgot. So Pinterest has what are called Pinterest Predicts. It's like Pinterest predicts 2024. And what they do is they try to predict what will trend. It is very important for every creator, whether you're in food or not food, to go look through that. Because you not only get great content ideas, but this is what's telling you. Pinterest is going to prioritize this year because they, quote, unquote, think it will trend. And so they are also doing Pinterest Predicts weekly where they're giving you updates to say, I just looked at one about Coachella because Coachella is happening and it says the search for bows, like hair bows, is up like 2,800%. Sure. And so this will give you kind of some ideas as to what people and they had a lot of food related content too. So check that out as well and see if some of the new recipes you're creating can kind of go along with some of this predictions that they're putting out there.

That's great. And Emily dropped in the chat a link to that area. Thanks Emily, for passing that along. We'll keep working through some of these questions here. Vanessa says currently I use tasty pins for context. We previously owned a business called WP Tasty. We sold that. There's new ownership, but that was a plugin that we had created kind of focused on Pinterest. And so Vanessa's saying I use tasty pins on my posts to allow readers to pin photos within the post. And I also include two or three hidden pins. Would it be better to just set one forced pin instead? So can you talk about what a hidden pin is, what a forced pin is, and then what best practice is today with those two things?

Yeah. So best practices really goes along with people visiting our site and we wonder like, okay, if they're coming to our website and they want to save for later, I want to make sure that they forced to pin the right thing right. And it's not just some sidebar image or something like that. I still think that's a good practice to have set up something that, you know, if they hit the pin it button, it goes to the right pin that you want to have pinned. Because we have seen examples where wrong thing get things get pinned. It's just not not going to work. But I think if you just have one and I my assumption is that that force pin is the hidden image. Like I would make those the same thing. I wouldn't make them any different. I would say if you have one main image, this is the one that you want everybody to pin. Just choose that. What we are seeing is that less and less people when they come from Pinterest to your website, which is their most common behavior, they're already within the app and the app has a save button that's right there at the top. And from what I understand, it should pull that forced pin so that that one is right there. So as long as you know that the people are pinning those right things, that's most important. I don't think two or I think two or three might be a little overkill.

Sure. And one of the things that we try and do is we try and include code. There's like no PIN code that you can include within the image text or within the image code. And so an example being, you know, and we did it because we started to see, hey, we're getting a bunch of traffic to this post from Pinterest. Let's see what the PIN is. And it was like a picture of Lindsay and I that somebody had posted from the sidebar and is like, shoot, like that probably would be double the amount of traffic if it wasn't some random picture of us. And then a recipe. And so what we started to do is include this no PIN code anytime that we have an image that shouldn't be included. When somebody clicks to pin, for example, you know, it could be comment images from people that are leaving comments. Or maybe you have like also recommend area where you have some images of other recipes and you want to add no code, no PIN code to that or everything in your sidebar. And so while we're not forcing any one single image, what we are doing is we're removing any of the images that are like definitely not related to the singular piece of content that somebody's looking at and then letting people from there decide which one they want to pin. But the forced pin. Interesting to hear about that being something within the app itself. And a good reminder for me even like to use the app and specifically to use mobile. Is that is your assumption at this point? 90% of people who are using Pinterest are. They're not going onto their desktop computer and using it.

No, no, no. And I think that's why you can look in your audience insights or maybe it's called conversion insights. You can see what the majority of your traffic is using, whether it's tablet, mobile, web, whatever. I think most people use either an iPad or a tablet and their phone to look things up that.

Great. Kelly's asking this. I'd like to know more about packages and services Kate offers. This is great. Hey, to help Pinterest accounts and exactly. And what exactly do they take over? So making pins, pinning, cleaning up boards. And then this is maybe a hard question to answer, but how much growth can I realistically see? What is the average return on investment for hiring that out? So if you can talk about, you know, usually at the end we get a little shout out, but we can do it kind of midway through here. Just a chance to talk about simple PIN Media. And I know it's multifaceted. You know, Pinch of Yum uses Simple Pin. And we've also used Simple Pin when we've kind of tested out some advertising. And so I know there's a lot of different things that you can do for. But let's say it's a food publisher who's publishing recipes to a site. Like, what would be some of the main services they might look at at simplepin?

Yeah, it's a great question. So I'll say right off the bat, one of the best things is just to book a discovery call. Like, our team wants to, like, look at your account and do all these things. So go do. That's on our site, simplepin.com pin media.com I would say one of the things first that we look at is we want to say, where are you at in your Pinterest journey? So if you're totally new, you don't have an account set up, you're going to want to make sure everything's set up. We have an accelerator package that does that. But I would say even more so getting to the growth piece. Pinterest is so seasonal, especially with food, and we're in Q2, and Q2 is notoriously like the lowest traffic time. And even in Pinterest, like investor reports, they'll say the same thing too. So when you start depends on your growth rate. And from a study we did a while ago, it was like 1 to 3% per month. And that's being very conservative because I don't want to promise somebody that they're going to get 10 to 15% growth. And then they're like, wait a minute, it's at three. So it all depends on to how often you're creating content. So if somebody came to us and said, I haven't created content for a year, but I've been doing a ton of images, well, your growth is going to look different. It's been stagnated for a while. That might take a little while to kickstart. So I would say when anybody hires anybody, whether it's hiring us or somebody else, you want to ask those questions about what they're going to tackle for you. Are they going to tackle new images with new templates? Do you get, you know, editing rights to those images, like feedback on that? And ads too, like you said, are they experimenting with ads? Where do they get their levels of education? So not just even hiring Simple Pin, but kind of overall, when you think of hiring out. I also tell people, if you really like Pinterest, like, it is your jam. You geek out about it. You like to schedule and do all those things. Hiring might not be the best, but a consulting call might be the best. A strategy call, because then you can ask questions. Right. But we get a lot of people who are like, I hate Pinterest. It's confusing. To me, that's the best when you want to outsource it completely. So knowing that part about yourself really sets you up for success when it comes to hiring somebody to take this off your plate or just consult with you.

Yeah, that's great. And, you know, as a creator, there's all of these considerations, like, how much bandwidth do you have from a time perspective? How much bandwidth do you have from a finance perspective? Like, if you're willing to invest in your business and you're just starting out, that looks different. If you're strapped for time, but you know it's something you want to build. Even, like, maybe you've been creating for a long time and haven't focused on Pinterest, it's going to be easier to get a return in that realm versus if you're just kind of starting out everywhere. I love the idea of the discovery call. Like, one of the things that I've found is, like, whenever I do one of those, I also learn a lot. Like, you are discovering not only what your needs are, but also opportunities that exist and somebody just to be able to talk to you about kind of what your hopes are. And that's on your site, just on SimplepinMedia.

Yeah, it's like 25 minutes. And yeah, ask us. That's so fun for us, especially to just ask you, like, are you coming back to Pinterest? Do you like Pinterest? Do you not like Pinterest? What are your goals? And a lot of the conversation we're hearing right now is people saying, I kind of gave up on it in 2019. 2020. I focused on Google. And now that Google's changing, I need to focus back on Pinterest. But I'm tired. Like, we're all tired as creators kind of on this hamster wheel. So those are things we take into consideration. I'm with you. I'm a big discovery call person. I'm like, I want to know the person. I want to know the company and ask a lot of questions.

Great. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clarity. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one. With Clarity, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clarity's robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links, and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you're making your good content even better. And that's why we created Clarity. It's a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of clarity after signing up. To sign up, Simply go to clarity.com food that's clarity. C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food thanks again to Clarity for sponsoring this episode. Here's a specific question from Vanessa. Is it still useful to have a blog board? For example, a board that is named after your site and just has all of your pins on that board?

Yeah, I like to have one just for search purposes. So we know the board name the board description and then pins within that board hold all the weight together. So I like just ours is just simple pin media, but we also have one for our podcast. So simple pin podcast. And I really only do that to make sure that the search algorithm knows that we're on the platform and we're there and all these pins have the same simple pin media are a part of it. But if you don't, it's not a deal breaker, but I suggest it.

Yep. This is a question from somebody who met you at tastemaker, Carol Yu. She says purple hair. I just met at tastemaker and some of the other bloggers told me it's a long game, two to three years before you see growth from Pinterest. Why would I spend the time now and how could I make that time frame shorter? And then some additional context. She says. I have no Pinterest experience, so want to know the time investment I would need to spend to start the start things up, start our business.

Yeah, that's great question. So I don't think it takes two to three years. I'd say I think it takes six to nine months. And it's all about how you frame up where it fits in your marketing plan. It's less so I look at it and I say okay, I want Google, YouTube and Pinterest as my workhorses. They're the things that are going to drive search traffic. Google and YouTube are together, and then I want those to be working for me all the time. And those are cold audiences. So I assign cold over there. Then when I put, you know, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is, then I'm assigning like a warm engagement. And so a lot of people will look and they'll say, okay, well, I don't know if I want to invest in Pinterest, but I will invest in Instagram. I feel like it's moving, but there's less conversions. So I always tell people, put it in, like, where do you want it to fit in your whole marketing suite of options? And why, like, I just made a decision to really not focus on Facebook this year because, well, I'm, I'm just not right. I'm choosing to kind of leave that one off. But I am choosing to invest now in YouTube because I see the power of Google, Pinterest, YouTube, and I say, this is what I want long term. And so if you're investing in a platform, six to nine months, one to two years, whatever it is, that's why you do it. And that's how you can kind of frame it up. As far as time investment, the beginning is going to be a little bit more because you have to get some boards created. You have to optimize your profile looking at keywords. That's probably going to take you anywhere from five to eight hours in itself. Just kind of like building out your infrastructure, your templates. But once you get into this groove of creating images, which, you know the hardest part is creating the post, right? Like creating a big blog post and all these images is really tough. The Pinterest part is like a 30 minute, like, adjacent piece. And then you could pin it to your infrastructure you've already set up. So that can take less than two hours a week. Once you really get going, it just feels like a mountain to get to that point.

Yep, that's great. And it's like you said, it's these little things that over time you can, you know, you have maybe one sprint, it's like five to eight hours. You get all that in place. After you do that, then you have the marathon of creating content on a platform, which is kind of the cumulative effort over a long period of time. And here's a question about pin comments. So this person is asking, some of my pins have comments disabled and I'm unable to turn them on. Why is that?

Yeah, I don't know, actually. That's interesting. I know that you can disable it when you pin it and I, I know there's been a lot of changes with editing after something has pinned. Has been pinned. So I kind of wonder if that's. They're not allowing you to edit the existing one because originally when it was pinned, the comments was turned off. That would be my guess at this point because we just see that they're a little bit. They're cutting back on that. Like you can't edit something after it's gone out.

Interesting. Jocelyn is asking from Jas Mahal. Is branding very important when creating pins? And what she means by that is like colors and fonts always being the same or is it better to kind of change things up a bit?

Yeah, no, 100% branding, like I would say, go making sure you have your colors, your font, your font should be super easy to read. If it's not not, you can change it up a little bit. Your logo on there, we saw a lot of people putting at the bottom, like simplepin media.com 1. You don't need the dot com. Right. Because somebody's. It doesn't matter. But to start to put your logo in places around your pin image that start to build that brand recognition that like, oh, this is a pinch of yum recipe. Oh, I like theirs. Right. Because they're not following you, chances are. And they're seeing you cold, like in different places. So branding a hundred percent. And then when you create those fresh images I was talking about earlier, where you want to optimize for maybe a holiday. And that holiday, let's say we just had Easter, put like an Easter egg on it. But don't change up your whole branding. You can add elements that facilitate people recognizing. Oh, this is holiday specific.

Yeah. The idea being maybe you have an individual piece of content that does really well. And one of the ways to benefit even more from that is having your brand being associated with that piece of content. Because one thing is like, you get traffic, but the other thing is for every click that you get, there's probably a hundred. I don't know, you know the conversion rate better than I would. But like a hundred people who view it and see it.

Yeah.

If they're just looking at an image, that's much different than if they're looking at an image with your logo on it. And that kind of brand awareness can be a really positive, meaningful thing.

Yeah. That's your impression number. So look at your impressions. Those are people who really didn't do anything with your pin, but they saw them and so those impressions hold weight. It's what most brands want. That's the number they care about the most. Why? Because it's brand recognition. Think like a brand. How do I get brand recognition for my content?

Yep. Almost like I think of Target center here where the Minnesota Timberwolves play. It's like nobody's clicking or transacting in any way. It's just the number of times that Target is said that they do a flyover and they see the target logo. Like all of those impressions are valuable, which is why they pay, you know, tens of millions of dollars to be the kind of premier sponsor. And we can be thinking about that as creators and publishers as well. That's great.

And don't put your logo in the bottom right because that's where it gets covered up with the visual search tool. You can't see it.

Oh, interesting. That's great. How about scheduling tools? So what is best scheduling in Pinterest? The native scheduler or Tailwind or both?

Yeah, my team has tested them all and here's what we've come back to. We still do prefer Tailwind for its functionality. It is the only one that has interval pinning. We finally figured out that that's proprietary. Proprietary tool to them. So that's why nobody else has it. So you have. We've tried Planoly. It's been great, but it's really doesn't feel very productive. Later Buffer Hootsuite tried them all and we keep coming back to Tailwind. Pinterest Scheduler can only go out 30 days. A lot of people do like it if they don't want to pay for it and they don't have a lot of content. So that is my suggestion to you. If you're new to blogging, you're new to starting out with Pinterest. Just use the Pinterest scheduler. It is free. So, yeah, go that direction.

And then if you are interested in paying for a tool, Tailwind would be the one that would be good.

Yeah.

Another question from Jocelyn. From Jocelyn Hall. Are auto postings ranking higher than manually posting on Pinterest? If auto posting, which tools to recommend, which we just talked about. So.

Right. No, they're not ranking any higher. We haven't seen any difference. There are claims out there that they do rank higher. We've tried it multiple times. We can't force any difference. We can't see it in any of our studies. But there always be like urban legends out there.

Totally. Yep. There's let's see here a couple other questions. I think we can hit all of these to wrap it up. Up. Vanessa says what ratio is best these days for Pinterest images? Like a two by three or long tens. Okay, two by three.

So like two wide, 1000 by 1500. Yep, got it.

And what about like a really long pin? Is that a thing of the past? Is that still thing in the past?

Okay, yeah.

Great. Why is that? Like, because they're not showing. They're getting cut off.

Yeah, I don't. They're getting cut off too. We saw somebody who had a really long old infographic and it just cuts it off. Some auto adjust. They really left a lot of freedom for them to choose which ones they cut off and which ones they auto adjust. So if you don't want to mess with it, just stick with the 2 to 3.

Great. We talked about a scheduler, so I'll skip that one. How about auditing boards? So Sylvia is saying what is the best way to audit boards? So maybe talk about what that is and why it's important.

Yeah, super important.

It's a big question.

Yeah. We have like a profile audit cleanup guide in our shop, simplepinshop.com so there's that. It's pretty cheap. But I'll say right away you're going to know that Pinterest is going to change the keywords that they prioritize. I would say like once a year, every eight months or something like that. So just recently I did this on my account and we searched some boards that we had board names and they weren't really coming up. And so we changed up the keyword and said, you know, we're going to change up just Pinterest Marketing, da da da, whatever it is. I recommend auditing one time per year and that means looking at the boards that are getting the most engagement and looking at the boards that are getting the least engagement. Fix the ones that have the least engagement first and then also pay attention. Are you creating content around that particular board? If you are not, then you need to decide what to do with it. Maybe it's one that you have a bunch of personal stuff on. You can audit it and move that to secret. If you're not using it for anything business wise, but definitely taking. I always say just do it at night when you're watching tv. Like it's easy enough to do to go back and forth between the search bar. You can change up the names of your boards and it auto redirects. So if you have your board linked anywhere on your site or anything. Don't worry about it breaking a link. It'll just automatically redirect.

Great. Two more questions. Is it better to update an old existing pin or just create a new pin that leads back to the same place on our site?

Create a new pin. You're. Because of what I said earlier about Pinterest limiting the editing functions, you're not going to be able to do that as much anymore. So just create something new. Great.

And then last question here. If I have 15 to 20 group boards that aren't mine, can I share the same pin to all of these boards, or do I need to make a new pin for all of these boards?

I think I'd back up a little bit from that and say, why do you have 15 to 20 group boards? And if you don't have those boards yourself, then I would create those first and you can share the same image to all of them. But I wouldn't do it back to back to back, because when people go to your profile, they see your activity, and if you've pinned that same pin over and over again, that's what will be there.

And it will look kind of spammy.

Yeah, totally.

Yep. Great. Kate, this is awesome. We were able to get through all the questions. I would. Two things that I'm going to ask here. For anybody tuning in live would be interested to hear one takeaway that you had. And it's valuable for us to see it, Kate and I to see it, but also for anybody who's listening live and following along with the chat, to also see somebody else talk about the thing that they learned or that was new to them. So maybe if you had a question that Kate answered, you can talk about what your takeaway was. If you were just listening and tuning in, you can share one of the things that you learned, kind of that gold nugget. And I think it also helps us as continual learners, reflect on any time that we join in on something like this to say, hey, here's the thing that I learned. Here's the takeaway that I had and kind of solidify that moving forward. The great thing is when we learn one of these things, it can be with us forever. It can be something that we take with us, makes our business better, and it's all about that compounding. One of the things that I loved that you talked about, Kate, was this idea of like, hey, 1 to 3%. And it might not sound like that much, but if you draw that out over a decade and we all are figuring out Collectively, how to get better by 3%. That can really add up and it can have a profound impact. And so excited to see some of these responses coming in. Catherine is talking about doing a board audit once a year. Heidi says, glad to hear Pinterest is such a strong search tool. M. Fallon says the idea to tweak or rework pins creating a brand board for Jocelyn. A lot of really good comments coming in. So excited to see that the process for setup and starting shouldn't be as laborious as I thought it would be, says Carol. The branding piece. Katie Kexa is adding logos and the importance of that. Sydney says Pinterest takes time, like starting a garden. You need to put the time in to cultivate and plant the seeds. So a lot of really great pieces of information here that people are taking with them. Kate, from you, sharing your knowledge. Thank you for that. Do you want to do one more quick? You talked about it about halfway through, but just if people are interested in working with you, it sounds like the Discovery Call is the best way to go. And then maybe you can do a little shout out to, like, the places that you're producing content because you also produce content all about Pinterest and people can learn from you ongoing. It's not just in these little sessions that we do, but where else can people follow along with you?

Yeah, the Simple Pin podcast is a big one. And then we're really ramping up YouTube, producing one video per week. Really getting into the nitty gritty. A lot of times with the podcast, you can't always show somebody how to do something. So that's what we're doing on YouTube is being able to show people and answer some questions. So. So go check that out too. Yes. Discovery Call is the best. Our team over there, we're constantly trying to get better and better at how we serve people. But we have a blog@simplepinmedia.com products. Like we've kind of tried to create this whole suite of Pinterest options for every budget. So you can find us there.

Awesome. It takes a team to pull these off. So Emily's been sharing links. Katie went through the process of setting up a lot of this on our team. Kate, obviously your expertise and knowledge is hugely valuable. So. So we can do, in the chat, we can do like the virtual round of applause, the applause emoji. Or you could just do like, you could just type in hands if you. If you don't know where the emojis are. Yeah, clap, clap, clap. Shannon says, but thanks, Kate. It's Always a great joy to talk to you and to learn from you. It's benefited us and I know it's benefited many other people as well. So I'll hang up this zoom call and it actually disconnects. We have a little waiting room when we start it, but it just closes out at the end here. So thanks, Kate. Thanks for everybody for tuning in.

Thank you.

Thanks to all the team members to pull it off. We'll see you guys next time.

Bye Bye.

Hey there Emily, here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast episode and really appreciate you taking the time to tune in and let's listen. In case you didn't know, in addition to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, we also have the Food Blogger Pro membership, which is where we teach our members how to start, grow and monetize their food blog. We have lots of incredible resources to help you on your food blogging journey, including our courses, our community forum, our Member Only, live Q&As, our deals and Discounts page, and so much more. You'll get instant access to all of this when you sign up for a Food Blogger Pro membership. We have two awesome membership options available to you, our Yearly membership or our Quarterly membership, which is just $99 a quarter and allows for some more flexibility if you want to try the membership out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you're interested and want to learn more or to sign up, head to foodbloggerpro.com join. We are so grateful for our Food Blogger Pro community and we would love to have you join us. Thanks so much for tuning in this week and we'll see you back here next week for another episode. Have a great week everybody.