17. Pinterest: Then and Now

Stephanie 0:00

There are a lot of quotes out there about the importance of not looking backwards if you want to keep moving forward. I appreciate this sentiment, but if you want to create an effective Pinterest strategy for your business, it's important to take a quick look backwards at the history of this platform. So let's chat about it.

Stephanie 0:22

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 0:34

Welcome back to the podcast. We are going to keep talking about Pinterest this week. Last week, we kind of busted a few common myths that you might hear about Pinterest and for this week, though, I thought it would be good for us to just take a look back at where Pinterest started and kind of the process they went through to get to where they are now, because I think it gives us a really important perspective when we start to create an effective Pinterest strategy. There's this quote by Winston Churchill that I love. It says, the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see. And I can easily liken this quote to Pinterest marketing, there are a lot of people who stumble onto Pinterest and they only look at the here and now of what's working and what Pinterest can do for their business. Right then they start using the shiniest of shiny things to see quick results. But then as soon as that shiny thing stops working, they bounce they aren't able to see that Pinterest could be a long term source of traffic, because they didn't take the time to look back at all of the ways that Pinterest has boosted the visibility of online business owners over the years. So in this episode, we're going to look back just briefly at the history of Pinterest. My hope in doing this is that you can just see a longer future with this platform, instead of chasing the latest and greatest flash in the pan. So first, let's talk about the early days of Pinterest.

Stephanie 2:15

Pinterest was officially launched in 2010 it was in the works from about 2008 / 2009 but it officially launched in 2010 and it was a website. It wasn't an app yet. In fact, the founders of Pinterest, they came up with the idea for Pinterest after they had created a phone app that failed, but like a lot of web based apps, it started out just as an invitation only beta program. You couldn't just create an account and log into Pinterest. There was this whole process where you either had to receive an invitation from someone or make a request to join. That then had to be approved, and that went well. So then in 2011 Pinterest released an app for iPhone, and that was one of the catalysts for its huge growth at that time, because at that point, it was still just an invitation only beta program, but it was growing at lightning speed, and creating the app just amplified that. The next year, Pinterest then was open to the public, and you no longer had to request to join the site. And in that same year, it was 2012 Pinterest launched the ability for businesses to create Pinterest accounts, and this was another huge step in organic marketing for businesses. But at this point, Pinterest was still a bit of the Wild West. I mean, people were just creating mass quantities of boards and saving pins at lightning speed. So by 2014 Pinterest reported that there were more than 750 million boards with 30 billion pins. But the search aspect of Pinterest, it still needed just a little bit of work. So that's when, in 2014 they launched guided search. And a lot of us refer to the guided search as the Pinterest bubbles. So you've probably seen these. When you type something into the search bar in Pinterest, there are these colorful bubbles that pop up underneath so that you can refine your search, and you kind of go down a rabbit hole of different keywords, and they did that in an effort to help people discover more topics, more ideas, more inspiration as they were searching. So as these search functions of Pinterest became more sophisticated, it started to open doors for bloggers with business accounts to use the platform just a little bit more strategically. And this is when the glory days of Pinterest began.

Stephanie 5:12

From 2014 / 2015 to about 2019 Pinterest was one of the top choices for organic marketing. If you had a blog or an online business, you wanted to be on Pinterest. So when I launched my own lifestyle blog, a mommy blog, in 2016 it did not take me long to realize that I needed to learn how to use Pinterest, and I saw a lot of success. So last week, I talked about the camp of people who use Pinterest only and the people who use SEO only. I currently, now, after lots of experience, I'm now in the middle. I think it's important to use both. I've learned how to use both, but back when I first started my blog, I focused only on Pinterest SEO. And I was not alone. A lot of bloggers focused just on Pinterest, especially if they were just getting started. And the reason for that was because learning Google SEO was intimidating, because Google's algorithm has always just been very mysterious, it was clear that it would take more time and effort to crack the code for how to rank on Google. During the glory days of Pinterest, though, there was a pretty clear cut path to success on that platform. People just had to create a pin for one of their blog posts, and then they would cycle that pin graphic through a huge number of boards, and they would repeat this for all of their blog posts, to ensure that they always had a fresh pin going out. The reason for the strategy was that bulletin board aspect of Pinterest. When a follower logged on to Pinterest, they would be greeted by the most recent pin activity of all the accounts they followed. Since bloggers and businesses were pinning essentially around the clock, they used tools like Tailwind to help them do that, their content was always getting in front of their followers. It really was an easy code to crack when you compare it to Google's search algorithm, plus, it really didn't take long at all for people to discover fresh blog posts. On Pinterest, you could write the post and have people visiting it within a very short period of time. It took months and months for blog posts to get noticed on Google, if they ever ranked at all. And so this is another reason why newer bloggers flocked to Pinterest instead of focusing on Google SEO. But as we know, all good things must eventually come to an end. And that day for bloggers who used Pinterest, it came in April of 2019 and that is when Pinterest became a publicly traded company.

Stephanie 8:13

So let's talk a little bit about Pinterest of the 2020s and I like to call this the stock market days of Pinterest, and so when it became a publicly traded company, Pinterest really did have a strong start in the stock market, but ever since, it has kind of tapered off just to a more stable presence. But really, most bloggers aren't really interested in how investing in Pinterest would boost their portfolio. Instead, we've kind of been focused on how Pinterest new priority of keeping their investors happy would impact the platform, because it did impact the platform in a pretty big way when Pinterest became publicly traded because we know Pinterest has always been revenue driven, all businesses are, but it became an even bigger priority once it became a publicly traded company. But the main issue with Pinterest's ability to bring in revenue is that for most companies, a lot of their revenue comes from ads. People need to spend more time on the platform in order to increase ad revenue for the company, but you have to think about the ultimate point of Pinterest, and that is to leave the platform. If you find a recipe that looks interesting, what do you do? Yes, you save it, but you also click on it and go to the website. People have deliberately saved and organized pins on Pinterest for the sole purpose of finding what they need quickly and then leaving the platform and moving on. So that became a challenge for Pinterest. They're like, wait, we need people to stay on this platform so we can get more ad revenue and make our investors happy. So in an effort to do that, Pinterest, over the past few years, has experimented with a lot of different ways to keep people on the platform. The most infamous experiment of this time period was the experiment of idea pins. These short form video pins were intended to mimic Tiktok videos / Instagram reels. And the goal was to keep people scrolling on Pinterest like they do on traditional social media platforms. In an effort to make idea pins more successful, Pinterest made adjustments to the algorithm to encourage people to make idea pins. The feeds were getting flooded with IDEA pins. And Pinterest was like, see, you'll get more views if you make idea pins. And they even had a rewards program to pay people to make idea pins. One of the main problems with idea pins, and I'll just mention it briefly, was that they originally did not allow any outgoing links, so you could make an idea pin for some of your content, but there was no point, because people would just stay on the platform. They couldn't go and visit your blog. There wasn't a way for them to do that. And so that's why, initially, idea pins were slow to take off, because a lot there were a lot of holdouts. A lot of bloggers were just very anti idea pins. I was one of those people, but I will tell you, there were a lot of very loud people in the online marketing space saying that idea pins were the future, so you should just get on board or give up. And some bloggers were doing that. They were giving up. They were leaving Pinterest in droves. But there were others like me that stayed the course, and because deep down, we knew that Pinterest, they would have to right the ship eventually, because we just knew they weren't going to be able to make fetch happen. It was just too far from the original purpose of the app. What made it unique and what made it special? What made people request invitations to join way back in the day, they couldn't stray too far from that, or the whole platform would just flop. But Pinterest also had another little bit of an identity crisis during this time, because they started trying to advertise primarily as a shopping platform. A lot of us bloggers got nervous when the CEO kept referring to Pinterest in press releases as a shopping platform. He didn't really talk about the fact that Pinterest was a visual search engine or using words like discovery. They were using a lot of words like shop, and so that also made us nervous during that time. But from 2020 to now, what we've done is we've just adjusted our strategies to focus only on the search engine aspect of Pinterest, because between idea pins and all the other craziness, the home feed algorithm has been in full control of Pinterest, there really is no more code to crack when it comes to the social media aspect of the home feed, you know, like pinning at certain times and having that complicated schedule like it's just not a thing. But the good news is that focusing on just the SEO part of Pinterest that has allowed for all of us to just create a more realistic, modest pinning strategy, but it can still provide consistent traffic to our websites. So I started my blog in 2016 like I mentioned, and then I started my Pinterest management business in 2019 so that was a tricky time to be pinning for other people, and I had to be really mindful of making strategic decisions that would get my clients a return on their investment and modest, realistic pinning without complicated tailwind cues that took some getting used to, for those of us who were familiar with the glory days of Pinterest, but overall, it has worked just fine, and just as we suspected, the pendulum is now starting to swing back the other direction. So in 2023 Pinterest merged idea pins with all of the other pin types on Pinterest. There's no longer this push to create a separate type of content, and they're not giving idea pins a ton of preference in the home feed, like they used to. They're no longer considered the holy grail on Pinterest, and the whole platform is just starting to feel a little bit better. In fact, in a recent call that the CEO did for investors, he highlighted content curation again and saving pins to boards like he was talking about the actual purpose of Pinterest instead of only talking about shopping. And I just feel like that's huge progress, and it made my heart happy to read that. But as promising as that is, we will likely never see the glory days of Pinterest again, because there will always be investors watching the bottom line, but you can continue to use Pinterest to get more eyes on your blog posts, and as I shared in episode three of the podcast, people are still turning to Pinterest and it still works for organic marketing.

Stephanie: 16:36

I'm sharing all of this Pinterest history with you for two reasons. First, I think it's important to see how Pinterest has evolved over the years. Because if you're new to using Pinterest, and you hear people spouting off their opinions about Pinterest not working anymore, knowing the history of the platform, it will just give you some context about what they mean when they say that, you'll be able to take those opinions with a grain of salt and not get discouraged. The other reason I wanted to share this timeline was, in case you've been around for a while listening to those dates that I shared, can you identify the last date that you truly took a look at your own Pinterest strategy, because, as you just heard, there have been some major changes on Pinterest, even in just the past two years. So if the last time you adjusted your Pinterest strategy was in 2020 or even 2018 it's probably time to take another look to make sure that your strategy matches up with the current Pinterest climate. But don't worry.

Stephanie: 17:46

Staying up to date with Pinterest doesn't mean you have to chase every shiny new thing. In fact, that's why I came up with the concept of pragmatic pinning. It's a very realistic approach to using Pinterest that keeps you from panicking every time there's a new algorithm update. My course, bring your own traffic, walks you through this pragmatic pinning strategy. So just head over to stephanieroyer.podia.com and you can get started on the course so that you can update your Pinterest strategy with current best practices.

Stephanie: 18:30

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.