16. Let’s Bust Some Pinterest Myths

Stephanie 0:00

When you start looking for Pinterest advice, you will quickly find that there is no shortage of opinions. However, many of the things that you might hear about marketing on Pinterest aren't actually rooted in truth. So let's sift through the myths so that you can create a pinning strategy that's based on facts.

Stephanie 0:21

Hey there, teacher, business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:32

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I'm excited. We are going to be shifting gears a little bit, and we're going to talk about Pinterest. We touched on Pinterest at the beginning of this podcast, when it first launched, and then we talked about creating consistent blog content with a cohesive workflow, and so the next step in that organic marketing workflow is to publicize those blog posts on Pinterest, but just like any other platform that has been around for a long time and a lot of people use it, there are just a lot of opinions that circulate about how best to use Pinterest, and a lot of those opinions are essentially myths. So when I knew that I was going to be switching gears and talking more about Pinterest, I knew that I wanted to bust some popular myths right out of the gate. I think it's important to set aside some of our preconceived notions about Pinterest in order to talk about how best to use this platform moving forward. And actually, when I was mapping out this episode, my husband was sitting next to me, and I told him my idea to talk about some myths about Pinterest, and he mentioned the MythBusters show and how that's so fun, because they approach these myths as wanting genuinely to know if they're true or not, and if there's any truth behind them at all. And so that's kind of the angle we're going to take with this episode. I'm not going to say flat out that something is 100% false. Instead, we're going to look at some evidence to decide if these really are myths.

Stephanie 2:18

The first statement that we're going to analyze is that Pinterest is social media. Now, at the risk of being a walking cliche, I did go through and Google the definition of what social media is, and I got a wide variety of responses, but there were definitely some common threads among all of these different definitions of social media, the first is that it's an internet based website or application. Pinterest definitely checks that box. The second common thread is that the users of the platform can participate in conversations and connect with each other. Pinterest checks that box as well, because users can comment on pins and they can collaborate on boards when they're saving pins to the same board, and Pinterest users can see what other people are pinning and decide if they want to pin it as well. So there's definitely a social aspect to Pinterest in that way. And then the third common thread that I saw in these definitions is that social media is a form of communication. Now for me, this is the one that makes me just feel a little bit more iffy on whether Pinterest meets the criteria of social media. When I think of Pinterest, I don't feel like it's a method of making announcements or giving life updates. When I think of using a method of communication, it's to provide time bound information. And Pinterest is definitely more evergreen. So instead, I would view Pinterest more as a method of curation, rather than a method of communication, because as business owners, we're putting together a collection of pins on this platform so that people can come across our content when they search for a particular topic. You've likely heard the phrase that Pinterest is a visual search engine, and this is why. Because the content we're creating on Pinterest isn't being shown to our followers like the content we share on Instagram and Facebook. Instead, it's being filed away for people to find later. And this is a huge reason why most businesses who use Pinterest don't treat it like social media. So I would say that this myth is definitely busted, even though there is some truth to the statement, because there are social aspects to Pinterest, and there always have been, but the primary purpose of this platform is search and curating content on boards and so your Pinterest. Strategy for your business should focus on those elements more than the social aspect.

Stephanie 5:07

So the second statement I've heard a lot in various forms, and I think we should consider as possibly being a myth, is that newcomers are doomed. People who are new to Pinterest, whether they just started a blog, or maybe they have an established blog, and they're just now starting to use Pinterest. Whatever it is, if you have a new Pinterest account, you are just not going to see any growth. This viewpoint became popular during a period of time on Pinterest when it seemed like older, more established accounts were the only people seeing results on the platform. It also felt like the only pins that were showing up in search were what we call legacy pins. These are old pins that have been circulating for years. This trend was happening during a really frustrating season of Pinterest, and we're going to talk about the different seasons of Pinterest in the next episode. But when people saw this trend, they began to wonder if new businesses on Pinterest could ever gain traction. It felt like newcomers to the platform were essentially doomed. There was just no reason to try. Now, you might remember from episode three, I talked about a client that I had who was essentially using Pinterest as a brand new blogger. She had been using a personal account, but then started a brand new business account from scratch, and she started pinning to it with a relevant but realistic strategy, and she has seen huge growth on Pinterest, and that platform brings her a consistent amount of website traffic each and every month. But for this episode, I thought I would give a little bit more context and evidence to this discussion about whether or not newcomers are doomed to fail. And so in order to give you this evidence, we have to backtrack just briefly to talk about professional bloggers. So these are people who don't necessarily have any, you know, like TPT sellers have E commerce, an E commerce element, and a lot of professional bloggers don't. They're just looking for traffic. And there's kind of three camps. There's the camp that only uses Pinterest, that it's the Holy Grail for traffic, and they don't want to mess with Google, so they only use Pinterest. Then on the other side, there are the people that swear by Google SEO. They've cracked the code, and that's all they focus on. They don't bother with Pinterest. And then there's the camp in the middle. That's the camp I belong to, where it's really best to focus on both. Now it's a long story, but people who are firmly in that Google SEO camp, some websites in that camp were giving the wrong kinds of signals to Google, and they ended up getting caught up in a filter with the Google updates, and their sites have just been decimated. Their traffic was just gone overnight. And they are professional bloggers, like that's how they earn their money. And so they have started, a lot of them have started fresh websites from scratch and decided, well, we can't keep putting all of our eggs in the Google SEO basket. So they started using Pinterest again. Now, some of these bloggers used Pinterest in the past and then walked away when the glory days were clearly over. We'll talk more about the glory days in our next episode. But some of these people had walked away previously. Other people had never used Pinterest ever, because they were just Google people from the beginning. And so it's just been really interesting to watch the progression and how these brand new Pinterest accounts are succeeding. They're doing fine. And so I'm sharing all of this because if you are holding back on using Pinterest for your business, because you've heard that, it's not worth it to get started right now, like the time has passed, the ship has sailed, you can't succeed on Pinterest if you weren't already successful in the past. I want you to set aside that myth and feel confident in getting started. So whether you have a neglected Pinterest account that you haven't pinned to in years, or you have a brand new account that you're just trying to get off the ground, just know that you can still see success from this platform.

Stephanie 9:41

The last myth that I'm hearing quite a bit right now is just this overarching view that more is better when it comes to Pinterest. Now, this was a viewpoint that was held many years ago in a different way, but right now, because we have access to AI images and creating a ton of blog posts with AI, there's just this avalanche of fresh content, and there are some very loud voices in the Pinterest marketing space that are using that strategy to see a lot of results on Pinterest. But in order to decide if more is better, we need to answer a different question. More of what? If it's more of just the same pin that's getting pinned to more boards, then no - more is not better. That's a really good way to get caught in a spam filter. Do not do that. Don't take the same graphic and pin it more times to a lot of different boards. If it's creating more pins that are fresh for old and established blog posts, then that can be better. You just need to make sure you're doing it in a non spammy way, that you're using a variety of old blog posts and that you're using fresh pins each time. But when we say more is better, if we're talking about creating more blog posts so that you can create more fresh pins on the platform, then absolutely yes, more is definitely better, because having a large number of blog posts to share on Pinterest is a huge part of a successful pinning strategy. We'll talk more about that in future episodes. So I will say that this statement, more is better can be true in some cases, but you don't need to be pinning in huge quantities in order to see success from Pinterest. So you could say that more is better in some ways, but more is not essential. So let's take this back to your content creation strategy, you should focus more on writing fresh blog content than just staying on a hamster wheel of creating fresh pins for old posts. So let's say you only have three hours a week to devote to your organic marketing. That's all you have between blogging and pinning, you have about three hours a week, you will be better off using that time to create one new blog post and just a couple of fresh pins for that new post, than you would be if you created 20 new pins for just the same handful of old blog posts.

Stephanie: 12:40

So let's recap our three myths from today's episode. First Pinterest is social media, that one's essentially busted, because while there are some social aspects to Pinterest, the proof is in the pudding. Businesses see more success from their marketing efforts on Pinterest when they focus on its primary purpose of being a search engine. The second myth, that newcomers are doomed. That myth is definitely busted. New Pinterest accounts can see success on this platform with a strategy that focuses on current best practices. And then finally, more is better. This myth does have a bit of truth to it. The more pins you create for the platform, the more opportunities you have to rank in search. But the problem occurs when the ratio of fresh pins to new blog posts is out of balance. You don't want to get caught in a spam filter by creating hundreds of pins for just one or two old blog posts. Overall, the key to using Pinterest is to avoid taking advice from people who speak in absolutes. There can be quite a bit of gray area when it comes to marketing on Pinterest, so it's important that the voices you listen to leave a little bit of space for interpretation, instead of sharing potential myths as absolute truth.

Stephanie: 14:09

If you have heard any other chatter about Pinterest and you'd like to know if there's any truth to what you're hearing, I'd love to chat. Just send me a message on Instagram. My username is stephanieroyersolutions. Now if I hear enough additional myths, I might decide to address them in a second installment.

Stephanie: 14:31

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.