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New Ways to Get Discovered on Pinterest

Image of light bulb with the text: New Ways to get Discovered on Pinterest with Sarah Hoople Shere Head of Product Marketing, PinterestPeople come to Pinterest actively looking for ideas to try and buy. And the best ideas come from content Creators like you – bloggers, entrepreneurs, publishers, artists, and more. To make it even easier for you to connect with your audience and get more eyes on your content, Pinterest is rolling out a new business profile that gives you more control over how your business is represented.

They’re also sharing with us specific recommendations to help us get more distribution for our Pins. Let’s start with a look at the new Profile for businesses.

Attract Engaged Followers with a New Pinterest Profile, New Insights

Screenshot of the new Pinterest Profile for Businesses

Your new profile has a dynamic cover image that lets you highlight the content you want your customers to see first. You can show your:

  • Latest Pins to all boards,
  • Most recent Pins to one special board,
  • Or highlight the most recent Pins from your site.

Whatever option you pick, the Pins in your cover image are always the latest and greatest. Here’s a quick look at the options available and how you can customize them:

Extend Your Reach Beyond Your Followers

At the very top of your profile, you’ll see a new helpful stat—monthly viewers. This tells you the total number of people who saw your Pins in the last 30 days, so you and the people who visit your profile can see how far your influence extends on Pinterest.

And remember, you can always promote your Pins so they’re seen by people who are actively looking for products and services like yours.

Most of the tabs on your profile are self explanatory and are available publicly for others to view. However, you do have the option to remove your Activity tab. The Activity tab shows all the Pins people saved from your site and linked accounts. Removing hides the Activity tab from other viewers, but you can still see it on your profile. The More menu, which for now shows Pins you’ve tried, is not visible to others.

More Ways for People to Find Your Content

Pinterest has also introduced a new dedicated space for people to discover more ideas from the people and brands they care about (like you!). The new Following tab lets your followers see your latest Pins, in the order you save them. Notice that you access the Following tab by clicking the little icon with the people on it to the right of your search box (not to be confused with the “Following” section in your profile which shows you who you follow!).

Your followers are your biggest fans on Pinterest, and they’re the first to see your ideas. They’re also the first to weigh in on which content they love most. The more they engage with one of your Pins, the more it gets shown in other places across Pinterest—like search results, feeds, and recommendations—for hundreds of millions of other Pinners to discover.  Learn how to make the most of the following tab with these ideas.

Screenshot of Pinterest
The new Pinterest Follower Tab

Pinning Habits for Content Discovery – When and How to Save Pins

Check Your Links

When you Save a Pin from Pinterest, always check the link first. When uploading Pins to Pinterest, make sure you add a link! No one likes to see their perfect idea on Pinterest only to click your Pin and get a broken link. With user experience in mind, Pinterest does not distribute Pins with broken links. Should a Pin with a broken link find its way into the feed, users are likely to flag it – which can hurt the performance of all your Pins.

Pinterest is working to naturally keep Pins with broken links out of the feed, so don’t worry about deleting older Pins, but do make sure when you save a Pin the link is good.

Double Your Chances of a Save

What’s this magic, you ask? No magic – just math! If you create one Pin for each blog post, people who see and appreciate that Pin will Pin it. If you create and save two Pins for that blog post … well, you see where we’re going with this! Multiple images can dramatically increase the distribution potential for your content.

According to Pinterest: It’s okay to have multiple Pins that lead to the same webpage. In fact, it can be beneficial to save a variety of images that might appeal to different types of Pinners.Click to Tweet

Just make sure you change up the description for each version of the Pin. Try focusing on one keyword phrase for one and a different one for the other. That way your one piece of content will show up in several different searches!

Pin Early and Often

Pinners are planners! So make your content available when they first start getting ready for a holiday, an event, or a season. Thats as early as 45 days in advance! Start Pinning then, and keep adding fresh content at a steady pace right up until the date passes. Consider starting your Promoted Pins even earlier to make sure you optimize your ads by the time planning is in full swing!

Be the First to Pin Your Content

Pinterest loves new content! So, get your content on Pinterest as soon as it’s published and your Pin will be prioritized. 🏃

Save Pins to Relevant Boards

Relevance matters all across Pinterest, so save to the MOST relevant board first. That Pin will be prioritized in distribution. Feel free to save the Pin to other boards as well, but keep in mind that saving the Pin to irrelevant boards will hurt the reach of your Pins.

Get 5X More Saves

Adding the Pinterest Save button to your website makes it easier for readers to save your content to Pinterest – and increases saves up to 5X. It’s simple to add, too!

Pinterest will be rolling these updates out over the next couple months. If you need help getting set up, check out Pinterest’s best practices!

Want more ideas for getting your content found on Pinterest? Watch me and Sarah Hoople Shere, Head of Product Marketing, Pinterest in the replay of our LIVE Facebook broadcast, ‘Pinterest SEO, Best Practices, and Your Burning Questions Answered!’

📌 Pin me:

Image of light bulb with the text: New Ways to get Discovered on Pinterest with Sarah Hoople Shere Head of Product Marketing, Pinterest

50 Comments

  1. Avatar

    Multiple pins with different images per blog post is something I haven’t thought about, and interesting to know that is not only ok, but encouraged.

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Yes! More mileage for your content is always a good thing!

  2. Avatar

    It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. I still don’t have the new profile… I have been working with the “relevant boards” concept more tightly over the past 2 weeks. In the past, it didn’t really seem to matter whether Pins were on a vaguely relevant board or not. Sometimes those got more repins than on a tightly niched board. I’ve narrowed that down a lot (ie no Pinterest themed Pins to “content marketing”) but will be keeping an eye on it.

    My “tendency” is “Questioner” so I guess I’m a skeptic 😉 Re broken links, Pinterest has pushed those out in the past, but allowed us to report them. Not sure if they have a new system in place to identify them without reports.

    In any event, I wish I’d get the new profile already! I can’t see it on anyone’s profile yet.

    Thanks Alisa!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hey there, Louise! A lot of these things are still rolling out. So, while there are still some Pins with broken links floating around out there, they are becoming fewer and Pinterest is making a concerted effort to get rid of them.

      All of this is pretty new, so it may take time to see the full impact, but it is great to get some additional clarity on best practices for content creators!

      Oh, and I don’t have the new profile, either!!

  3. Avatar

    This information is wonderful! It makes it much easier to plan a pinning strategy.

    I have a question about the “Be the First to Pin Your Content” section. I have my blog posts go live at 1am each day. Does that mean my pin for each post should go up at 1am which is not a high traffic time or can I do it later that same day like at 8pm which is a high traffic time?

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hi Susan. Why not put your posts live later in the day? If you don’t want to do that, you could schedule a Pin in Tailwind for 1:01 am that would link to your blog post.

  4. Avatar
    Dana

    Are those first 5 pins supposed to be live pinned? Or can they be those scheduled via Tailwind?

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hi Dana! You can do it either way. It makes no difference. Thanks for your note! ~ Alisa

  5. Avatar

    Does it matter if the first five pins are saved to group boards or personal boards? And will Tailwind be rolling out a feature that will help us quickly choose the first five pins of the day or do we just have to move them around? I have a lot of pins lol, but I want to make sure the most important ones pin first with this new feature. And obviously easier is better 😂 Thanks for the well informed article! I love love love the new Pinterest layout!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hi, Jenn. Not a whole lot. I would mix it up – because if you share to group boards, you could show up in the follower tab of people who follow just that group board, and not your other boards. But, they might be less engaged than people who follow you/some of your boards.

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Cool idea from a FB Live watcher on accounting for the “first five” at midnight UTC using Taiwlind:

      Nicole Kops Black says “I figured out what my time converted to (for me it’s 5pm) and went into Tailwind. I scheduled 5 new pins at 5:01, 5:02, 5:03, 5:04, and 5:05 every day and then dragged my locked pins into those slots. It took about 30 minutes, but now the month is covered and my first five are optimized. “

      • Avatar

        I’m not sure I understand how this works. Do you mean those same 5 pins will go to different boards at those times every day of the month?

        • Alisa Meredith
          Alisa MeredithModerator

          The first five should all be different since they will show up in the follower tab. You can set them to go to any board you want.

  6. Avatar

    This call was so awesome. A lot of clarifications regarding some of the proper ways of pinning. Also great tips like the first 5 pins of the day should be yours. I can picture people waiting for the countdown of their UTC time correlation. Thank you Tailwind for making this call available for FREE and to the public. You guys could have easily charged some sort of fee to attend. This was so valuable! You guys rock, specially you Alisa!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Aww, thanks, Kenal! It was quite a privilege to be able to work with Sarah at Pinterest. We got so much great info. And yeah, I picture people wit their hands on the “save” button at 11:59UTC 🙂

      • Avatar

        I’ve actually watched the call/video twice and planning to a third time. I caught some things I missed the first time around, even though I was attentive the first time around. So many gold nuggets and insight regarding Pinterest. Continue to do great work at Tailwind! I will be leaving a comment on the Youtube video either late tonight or by tomorrow the latest.

        • Alisa Meredith
          Alisa MeredithModerator

          Wow! I just went though it to create a timestamped recap and my goodness, there was a lot! Thanks for your kind words – and comments, Kenal!

  7. Avatar

    I like your “pin me” at the bottom of this post. What are you using to have that?

    Ps- thanks for the new info too!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hey, Stephanie. We just include the image so people can Pin it. We have the save widget (Google Pinterest save widget) on the site which puts an easy save button over the image when you hover.

  8. Avatar

    Great stuff Alisa. I logged into my Pinterest account like an hour ago, just before I received this in my inbox. I was taken aback for a moment there. I looove the great look. Me thinks it looks so profesh!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      It DOES look profesh! They really wanted a way to differentiate the profiles of content creators and they did it! Thanks for coming by.

  9. Avatar

    I really enjoyed the recent webinar and was so inspired by it! It’s so interesting to learn that the first 5 pins you make each day will be prioritized. So helpful!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hi, Lily! I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I learned a lot, too 🙂

  10. Avatar
    khim

    Hi, what can we include for website verification if we do not have a website/storefront? I am referring this in the case of affiliate links (i think it’s allowed on Pinterest) and POD products with direct links to POD company. Would you advise to set a website up specifically to promote these links solely for Pinterest? Thank you!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      You can’t claim a site without a site. So, yes, definitely set up a site so you can direct Pinterest traffic there.

  11. Avatar
    Sonia

    Thank you so much for such a helpful article and great video! With regards to relevant boards is it better to have for example an only t-shirts board or Summer which includes t-shirts, accessories, food tips, travel tips etc. Which would be the most relevant one and best performing if I had to pin a t-shirt. I am very confused about this!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      You’re welcome! I’m glad you enjoyed it! Be as specific as possible. So, t-shirts would be better. Then you could have a board for Summer Accessories, one for Summer Recipes, Summer Travel Tips, etc.

      • Avatar
        Sonia

        Thank you so much!! I was so confused, I have both types of Boards, only product related and then theme related where I mix everything, now I know where to focus on. You have made my day! Have a lovely Friday and weekend.

        • Alisa Meredith
          Alisa MeredithModerator

          You are very welcome. Happy to help – and you, too, Sonia! ~ Alisa

  12. Avatar

    Thanks for this post 🙂
    I was unaware of these new changes and we use tailwind because tailwind is great.

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Awww, thank you! Also, I love your website URL 🙂

      • Avatar

        Thanks Alisa 🙂 And we love tailwind 🙂

  13. Avatar

    is there an exact size they should be now? I saw a live video that they must start out square now?

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      The ratio is what matters. Keep it to 2:3. Which could translate to 600x900px. No, they don’t need to be square. That can work, and will not be penalized, but it’s better to stick to a bit taller.

  14. Avatar

    Hi! Catching up here today with this video. Very timely. Have a couple of questions,
    1. Are text overlays still recommended for pins, or just to provide additional information?
    2. Does Lens work with text overlays?

    Thank you!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Hi, Kim!
      1. Use them if it helps add context to the Pin.
      2. Try it! I have and it seems to pick up the font/style of the text rather than the words themselves.

      Most welcome – thanks for your comment.

  15. Avatar

    Hi Alisa
    what an exciting video! We’ve gone through all recommendations, but struggle with one comment in the video WHEN to post those 5 first pins if you want to be at the top of the homepage when a user opens Pinterest. I remember that Sarah said that the feed is considering the first five posts of the content creator who pinned first on that day; so does that mean that you have to pin at 0:00:01 UTC to have the highest chance to be displayed before all other content creators that a Pinterest user is following?
    thanks
    Jan

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      I’m glad you enjoyed it!

      That would be the case if your followers are on at that time. Otherwise, Pin when they are on and engaged. Tailwind’s Smartschedule can help you do that. The only adjustment you might make is to make your first Pins at the time when your users are most likely to be on and engaged so that those first five are optimized for your followers.

      So, if your UTC is 5pm and your followers are engaged at 9pm, Pin your first (and best) Pins of the (UTC) day around 9pm.

  16. Avatar

    I usually use two different images for my posts but now i understand why the description needs to be different. Im not sure i understand the keyword bit with the two pin images though. Will need to check into that.
    As always, awesome content. Thanks

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      I’m glad it was helpful to you, Joleisa!

  17. Avatar

    Thanks a lot for some clarity at last.
    When it comes to Pinterest there is a lot of contradictory advice out there, so is great to finally discover the right things to do directly from Pinterest “mouth”.

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Right? So grateful for their openness!

  18. Avatar

    You are so informative and really speak in a way I understand, Thank you so much for that. My question is … I don’t have an activity tab, or even a “more” tab… I have the newly rolled out page. Any thoughts?

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      I’m glad it was helpful to you, April! I just looked at your account and it looks like the original profile, not the updated business profile.

  19. Avatar

    Really helpful video! I’m a little confused on size, though. When I look on my home feed, they’re showing me longer pins (but not the extra long size I’ve used for a long time). Or maybe those are long pins getting cut off? If they’re picking longer pins to show me, then long pins seem to be getting prioritized over the simpler 600×900? I was about to create a whole bunch of smaller pins for my posts without them, but now I’m not so sure.

    Thanks for any insight!

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Changes to the algorithm are still rolling out. A 2:3 ratio is recommended for the widest distribution. Hope that helps!

  20. Avatar

    Awesome video Alisa!

    There has been so much mystery into Pinterest up until now. The insight is unreal.

    Now anyone can use these actionable tips to get their pins seen.

    One thing I wanted to know is if your blog deals with a topic like money but there’s no Pinterest category for money, which category is the next best option for your board content?

    • Alisa Meredith
      Alisa MeredithModerator

      Wasn’t Sarah awesome? In that case, it probably doesn’t matter too too much. There’s really not even anything close for “money,” is there? I would probably go with “other.” For marketing, I use “technology,” but that’s not really close, either!


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