Pinterest Best Practices, Are You Following Them?

As a blogger, social media can play an important part in increasing your traffic and getting your posts out there for the world to see. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest can be your best friends, not only in gaining traffic but in securing the commissions and collaborations that are the goal of many bloggers who are trying to monetize their blogs. When you’re new to blogging (or even if you’ve been blogging for a while) the social media platforms can seem confusing to navigate and learn and it’s important to understand the best ways to use each one.

By far and away I have found Pinterest to be my greatest source of traffic when it comes to social media platforms. Aside from using good SEO methods so that your posts show up in search engines, learning to use Pinterest to the best of your ability can be a real game-changer.

Pinterest Best Practices, Are You Following Them?

 

This post contains affiliate links, meaning that if you choose to click through and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission at no cost to you. I was also compensated to create this post, though all opinions are my own.

How To Be Seen On Pinterest

It’s a well-known fact that the key to Pinterest is creating eye-catching beautiful images that attract people’s attention. As a visual search engine your graphics, of course, play a big role in getting the clicks and engagement you desire. You should always attempt to make images that are:

• High-Quality and Clear: Avoid using photos that are blurry or too shadowed.
• Vertically Oriented: While some square images do well on Pinterest typically a vertical image will look best on mobile devices and let’s face it, a lot of us are browsing on our phones nowadays!
• Contain Simple and To The Point Text: People want to know what your pin is about straight away. An easy to read title and text overlay can grab attention.
• Thoughtful Descriptions: While your image and text overlay might grab someone’s initial attention it can often be your description that earns you a click-through or repin. Don’t let your descriptions fall to the wayside!

However, your pin images and descriptions are only one piece of the Pinterest puzzle.

Pinterest Best Posting Practices

Sharing Ratio

Bloggers have always spent a good bit of time walking that line between being spammy and posting enough of their content to be seen. It’s a hard tightrope to walk. Typically you should try to share and repin using the 80/20 rule. This means sharing and repinning 80% of other people’s work and 20% of your own throughout the day. This will ensure that your account pins enough to be active but with enough variety to avoid seeming spammy and repeating your own pins too often.

NEW Content

You might have heard that Pinterest recently revealed that an algorithm change means that fresh content will outperform the sharing and repinning of older content. They came to this decision after noticing that people tended to interact with newer fresh content far more often then they did with older items.

While change can be scary for bloggers (Just when you think you’ve cracked the code it goes and changes on you!) we should be thankful that Pinterest noticed this trend AND informed us of it. As bloggers we want our content to be seen and Pinterest wants us to keep sharing relevant and popular content to their platform. By working together we can harness these trends to the benefit of all of us!

What Is New Content According to Pinterest?

But! What exactly is new content when it comes to Pinterest? New content on a blog means an entirely new post and let’s be real, it’s impossible for the majority of us to create enough new fresh content on a daily basis to remain active and visible on social platforms without resharing older posts.

Thankfully new content on Pinterest simply means a new image! You can still link to older posts and even reuse older successful descriptions and hashtags. While creating a new image might seem time-consuming it’s well worth your time to go back and freshen up old posts with new images and eye-catching pins on a regular basis. As always you should follow the image practices listed above.

How Can You Possibly Keep Up With All Of This?

It’s no secret that a large part of being a blogger is time management. Between creating new posts, hustling up collaborations and guest posts, showing love to our fellow bloggers (because the community is important!) and managing all the various social media platforms that companies and readers appreciate time can be your greatest challenge.

There are many ways to manage your time so that you get everything done, this ranges from time blocking strategies to using tools like a daily planner to keep track of it all.

However, there comes a point where you might find yourself growing faster then even these tools are capable of keeping up with. Time is valuable, not only in your work life but in your personal life as well and choosing to invest in tools that save you valuable time AND help you navigate one of the most valuable assets you have as a blogger can be worth it.

Consider Delegating

If you start to feel overwhelmed or frayed while trying to keep up with everything it might be time to consider adding a tool like Tailwind to your blogging journey.

Tailwind has been one of the blogging investments I’ve made that I don’t regret! But don’t take my word for it because everyone’s results will be different, Check out this analysis, provided by Tailwind, of the typical Tailwind results for Pinterest users.

Being able to schedule my pins ahead of time means that I can spend a few hours every week organizing my posts rather than trying to find the time and remember to pin several times throughout the day. This makes it far less stressful when I do sit down to browse Pinterest organically and it’s one less thing I have to worry about while I’m trying to create new content.

What I especially love about Tailwind is that the experience is highly customizable and they make it easy to try out beforehand by offering a trail that isn’t time-based. Rather then a typical 30-day trail (which can be wasted if you happen to get busy unexpectedly) but rather lets you schedule 100 posts over whatever time frame works best for you!

Likewise, after trying Tailwind and deciding that you love it, you can customize your plan by buying power-ups for the features you use the most. If you enjoy the Tribe community you can purchase a power-up that allows you to join more then the 5 tribes included with the Plus plan and if you find yourself using Smartloop, which helps you reshare you pins on a Pinterest approved schedule, you can add more loops.

And if you still feel overwhelmed? You might want to look into giving your Instagram a similar helping hand by looking into their Instagram plans too.

Take Advantage of SmartGuide

While all these features of Tailwind are helpful and can certainly take the pressure off of finding new pins to share and scheduling your posts probably one of the most helpful features of Tailwind is a relatively new one!

SmartGuide is like an automated helper who keeps tabs on your account and lets you know if your account is following all of the best Pinterest practices. If your posting at a healthy rate with a good mix of unique images and URLs to avoid seeming spammy SmartGuide will give you an All Clear! message, if some of your posting habits could be improved then they will help you out with some quick tips on where you might want to tweak your strategy.

SmartGuide also promises to continue improving and keeping us up to date with the best posting practices to get your pins seen, reshared and saved as Tailwind continues to work closely in partnership with Pinterest.

In Conclusion

Growing your social media platforms as a blogger means embracing changes on a regular basis. It means learning the ins and out of various sites and scheduling the time to make it all happen without a hiccup. It can be daunting and challenging but taking advantage of useful tools and new information can keep your blog going strong! Look at changes like this as an opportunity to revisit old content, update and refresh old templates and make sure that your content remains relevant and shareable! It’s never too late to breathe new life into an old post and a new pin is a great place to start!