69. Does Pinterest Hate Me Now?

Stephanie: [00:00:00] Just like any long-term relationship, there can be moments when you might worry that you and Pinterest are growing apart. In fact, you might even worry that Pinterest hates you now. Let's chat about this.

Welcome back to the podcast. If you missed last week's episode, I decided that we needed to have a bit of a spooky theme on the podcast for October.

So we are addressing some of our worst fears in organic marketing for this month. In last week's episode, we talked about the fear that no one will ever read your blog posts that you're writing, and now this week we're discussing a fear that is becoming more and more common these days, and that is the fear of finding yourself on Pinterest bad side.

I'm going to share some reasons why this fear definitely feels like reality in the current Pinterest climate. Then we'll talk a little bit about what Pinterest actually wants. And we'll wrap things up with an action plan of things you can do to keep this fear from actually coming to life. [00:01:00] Let's face it, it comes as a shock to no one.

When a blogger will mention that Pinterest now, quote unquote, hates them. We've seen it happen. A blogger suddenly loses a big chunk of traffic on Pinterest. Their impressions are non-existent. Their pins are nowhere to be seen in search results. Traffic dips happen to everyone on Pinterest, and there are a few reasons why they happen.

First of all, Pinterest is a very seasonal platform, especially in the world of education. If you notice a huge dip in your analytics graph, I would highly recommend that you hover your mouse over the date and it will likely be the day after a major holiday. And that is when a seasonal pin that was bringing you a lot of traffic is going to suddenly no longer be in demand.

So you will likely see huge dips on November 1st, December 26th, I mean even February 3rd [00:02:00] after Groundhog Day. So seasonality is a huge part of Pinterest ebbs and flows. Another reason for traffic dips is that the algorithm has just shifted its priorities. You'll likely remember when video pins were first rolling out on Pinterest. You would get a ton of impressions on your video pins because the algorithm was dedicating a higher percentage of the home feed to that type of content in order to get people used to seeing the video content and interacting with it.

And then that same thing happened with idea pins. And honestly, it's going to continue to happen every time Pinterest wants to shift its priorities. A third reason for dips in traffic on Pinterest is that you end up getting caught in a content or spam filter of some kind. The criteria for these filters changes as the algorithm shifts, and so there's always this risk that you [00:03:00] might inadvertently do something that Pinterest dislikes.

I remember when Pinterest discovered that pedophiles were using their platform inappropriately. The algorithm created a filter that targeted certain trigger words. Many parenting bloggers had their pins caught up in that filtering at first because their descriptions were using some of the child related trigger words that Pinterest was trying to deal with in their filtering.

And so over time, Pinterest was able to refine their filtering. And they adjusted the overcorrection that was causing so many parenting bloggers to lose their traffic. But it's just one illustration of the fact that you can be doing everything right and your traffic can take a nosedive. But in all three of these instances, Pinterest doesn't hate you.

There are just things that are out of your control, as Pinterest continues to grow and adapt as a [00:04:00] platform. I can totally see how this lack of control can become a source of fear. Luckily, by keeping tabs on what Pinterest actually wants, you can start to focus on the things you can control. At its core, Pinterest wants users to be engaged on the platform as they search for, and then curate ideas that are of interest to them.

The more often that users log onto Pinterest, and the longer they scroll through content, the more ad income the platform generates. So Pinterest is looking for high quality, engaging pins that serve their users and keep them coming back. That means they're going to reward accounts that create pins that get engagement of some kind right out of the gate.

The thing to keep in mind is that if your pins that had previously been receiving a lot of engagement are suddenly not, it doesn't mean that your content is suddenly [00:05:00] horrible and Pinterest hates it. More likely it's that the algorithm is being adjusted and those pins might be cooling off as a result.

I was one of the lucky Pinterest users who was able to get some legacy pins established back in the glory days, and those legacy pins have been pulling their weight in my total website traffic for a really long time. Even though these pins were old and a lot of them were pretty ugly, people continued to engage with those pins.

And then Pinterest was rewarding that engagement by continuing to show them in search results after all these years, it's been many, many years. That doesn't mean traffic has consistently been high for those pins. In fact, they've had ups and downs over the years. The pins would leave the search results completely for a season, but then they'd always come back,

until this year. I was hit with an algorithm [00:06:00] shift in mid-July that pretty much decimated my Pinterest traffic and I am still working on recovery from that. But do I feel like Pinterest hates me and my content? Absolutely not. They were making algorithm adjustments and my legacy pins didn't come out on top, and that's okay because at the time that it happened, I was not active on Pinterest at all.

I was planning my comeback, and I had not been creating pins for years. So it doesn't surprise me that Pinterest decided to stop favoring my content in the algorithm. I don't feel like they hate me though, and I'm confident in continuing to use the platform. So let's talk about what I'm doing and what you can do when you feel like you're in a season of losing on Pinterest.

The first thing you can do when you start to feel like Pinterest isn't favoring your content is to avoid panicking. I know that it's easier [00:07:00] said than done when these traffic numbers are tied to actual dollar bills. I monetize my website primarily with display ads, and so I'm no stranger to the stress of watching actual money slip through my fingertips whenever my traffic dips.

But you don't want to let panic start driving your Pinterest strategy. You don't need to chase whatever shiny thing a course creator is selling to help you weather an algorithm storm. Just ride it out. See what changes stick and which were overcorrections like I mentioned earlier in the episode, because those are going to be righted eventually.

Pinterest does not want some of these overcorrections to impact user experience, and so they will fix them. The next thing you can do is to keep moving forward with a realistic pinning strategy that focuses on fresh content. If there's one thing I know, it's that Pinterest will [00:08:00] never hate you for pinning new, helpful blog posts to the platform.

Another thing you can do to shake things up is to experiment with your brand colors, pin styles, titles, descriptions, images. When you put all of your eggs, or your pins, into one design basket. It can be more difficult to maintain user engagement because when all of your pins look the same, people might interact with your pins less because they feel like they've saved it before because it looks so similar to another pin they saved last week.

And finally, I always suggest diversifying your traffic sources so you're not relying solely on Pinterest traffic. That way when the algorithm shifts inevitably come, you'll have other traffic sources to cushion the blow. So to recap, you should view Pinterest as a long-term relationship for your business.

It's not a passing fling that cools off and leaves you to just [00:09:00] shrug your shoulders and say, well, Pinterest just isn't that into me. Instead, this long-term relationship will have ups and downs, but there is value in finding ways to make it work. The important thing is that you need to find the balance of how much effort you put into it and what you get from it.

It's that ROI imbalance that can make you feel like Pinterest really doesn't like you very much anymore. If you're looking for a realistic pinning strategy that focuses on best practices that can more easily weather those algorithm changes, you'll definitely wanna check out my pragmatic pinning strategy.

It keeps you from spinning your wheels and chasing every shiny new algorithm shift. Instead, it helps you design a sustainable pinning strategy that will help you get more traffic on autopilot. Just head over to stephanie royer.podia.com for a preview of the pragmatic pinning module in my course, bring Your Own Traffic.

There's also a link in the show [00:10:00] notes.