Brands beware: Pinterest contests and sweepstakes as you know them are fundamentally changing.
You see them on your Pinterest feed. You see them on many brands’ websites. You see them on your competitors profile. Pinterest contests are an inescapable part of Pinterest marketing. Major brands like Godiva, Carnival, Maggiano’s and many others have successfully used Pinterest contests to help raise awareness of their presence on Pinterest. However, Pinterest contests as you may know them are fundamentally changing.
The New “Don’ts” of Pinterest Contests
Before the new guidelines were implemented, brands ran contests with little regulation from Pinterest. However, many of the techniques previously used are now forbidden by Pinterest. From Pinterest’s contest guideline page:
- Don’t suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses you or the contest.
- Don’t require people to pin from a selection – let them pin their own stuff.
- Don’t make people pin or repin your contest rules. This is a biggie.
- Don’t run a sweepstakes where each pin, repin, board, like or follow represents an entry.
- Don’t encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment.
- Don’t ask pinners to vote with pins, repins, boards, or likes.
- Don’t over do it: contests can get old fast.
- Don’t require a minimum number of pins. One is plenty.
Implementing the “Don’ts” in New Contests
While the new Pinterest contest restrictions may seem harsh, by implementing them, a brand can make the contest experience much more valuable to both themselves and the user.Â
Choosing Pins
When deciding on a Pinterest contest or promotion, the brand must determine where they want the user to find the items to pin. While a brand can no longer ask a user to pin a certain pin or pin from a certain board, it is still OK to ask them to pin an item from the brand website or Pinterest profile overall.
Rules and Promotion
Make sure your contest instructions are clear and concise. Pinterest strongly discourages making a pin with the rules to the contest, so start using other social platforms to spread the word. Instead of creating a “spammy” pin, try sending out emails and posting the rules to your brand’s Facebook and Twitter.
 
Choosing a Winner
The days of picking a winner at random have come to an end on Pinterest. When coming up with rules for your contest, make sure to keep the judging guidelines fun and subjective. For example, Jetsetter hosted a Pinterest scavenger hunt contest where they provided clues every day for two weeks and users pinned an image from their site that they believed matched the clue. Jetsetter chose the winners based on creativity, visual interest and how well the pin fit the clues.
 
Keywords
Due to Pinterest’s update search engine, this method will no longer work for running contests. If you’re interested in Pinterest contests, email [email protected]
With the absence of designated repins, likes or comments, keeping track of contests has become much more difficult. Because of this, it’s very important that your brand chooses a specific keyword for users to use in the captions of their pins. You CAN use hashtags in your descriptions. Before deciding on what to use, be sure to do a quick search of Pinterest to ensure you’ve chosen a keyword unique to your contest.
When designing a contest to fit Pinterest’s new rules, think of it as a fun challenge for you and your followers. Pinterest wants you to think about your contests as “quality over quantity”. By eliminating the easy stuff, more creativity can shine through.
This post was originally featured on the Tailwind Blog as Implementing the New Pinterest Contest Guidelines
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Melissa Megginson is resident Community Manager and Cat Lady at Tailwind, the leading Pinterest & Instagram tool for brands. Melissa specializes in affiliate marketing, public speaking, and making our members look good. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @MelMegg.
Very helpful, Melissa! Thanks!
You say that “The days of picking a winner at random have come to an end on Pinterest” but I can’t see anything on the Pinterest guidelines that refer to how winners are chosen. Are you just saying this because subjective judging criteria are more likely to lead to higher quality content on Boards (which is clearly the goal of these new Pinterest guidelines), or is there specific language that I missed about Pinterest not wanting randomize winner selection?
Thanks, Nicholas, and sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you!
While they don’t come right out and say “no randomized winners”, Pinterest does encourage choosing subjective winners by stating: “DO Remember that Pinterest is all about people discovering things that inspire them. Reward quality pinning over quantity.”
There’s technically no way for Pinterest to know whether you actual chose the person with the “best” submission. However, choosing a random winner can diminish your brands appearance on Pinterest. Pinterest’s main objective with these guidelines is to keep the platform the clean, spam-free place we all know and love.
Hi Melissa
I am trying to organise a pinterest contest whereby followers pin their own photos with a specific keyword, however when I test the keyword it does not show up in the search – do you know what could be the problem?
Hey Kim,
Since this post was written, Pinterest has changed their search algorithms a bit (their post on the first search update be found here: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/49467580238/find-what-youre-searching-for) so there’s a good chance that the change affected keyword search. If you’re still interested in doing a keyword-related Pinterest contest, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] and I can provide a few options for you.
Hope this helps!
I’ve been researching these new contest guidelines and I’m finding them to be pretty vague. Am I the only one?
For example, “Don’t run a sweepstakes where each pin, repin, board, like or follow represents an entry.” Does that mean no sweepstakes are allowed? Or does it mean that sweepstakes are allowed, but with more restrictive entry requirements? Your interpreting this to mean that winners cannot be selected randomly from a pool of entries — I’m not sure.
Also, “Don’t ask pinners to vote with pins, repins, boards, or likes.” Does this mean that winners cannot be selected based on the number of times their pin is repined or liked?
If a random winner is not allowed and a “most repins” or “most likes” is not allowed, then it seems to me that the only contest type allowed is a judged competition, where the winner is determined by a subjective judging process (eg, most creative pin). If this is the only type of contest allowed, Pinterest should clearly state that to be the case. I hope that is not the case, however, because it puts a big burden on small companies to demonstrate that they have a fair judging process.
I do think Pinterest created the guidelines to be vague on purpose, and this post is just a reflection of how I interpreted the guidelines.
With that said, I do believe Pinterest has made it clear that they want contests to derive quality over quantity. In fact, he very first bullet point on the contest guidelines reads “Remember that Pinterest is all about people discovering things that inspire them. Reward quality pinning over quantity.”
As a small company it certainly is not ideal to adhere to a subjective judging process, but I do believe you will find that the followers and interactions produced from a subjective contest will be of a higher quality than those who are chosen randomly.
Again, these are only my interpretations of the guidelines. I think you’re probably correct that the lack of explicit condemnation of randomized contests suggests Pinterest is not ready to start going after brands practicing this style of contest. However, I do believe they are heading that way.
Hi Melissa, I am a blogger and I use rafflecopter. On the rafflecopter, one of the options is to “follow me on pinterest” to gain an entry into a giveaway. If Pinterest says you cannot gain an entry by follows, is this not allowed? Thanks for clarifying.
Hey Christine,
If rafflecopter is set on using followers as an entry criteria to enter a contest, then I’d suggest requiring another criteria as well.
For example, your rules for a Cutco contest could say something like:
“Step 1: Go to pinterest.com/cutcocutlery and follow our page.
Step 2: Go to cutco.com and pin at least one item from the website to be entered in the contest.”
You can, of course, make it less awkward sounding than that, but it is important to have the distinction that a follow is not a contests entry. Pinterest sure has made it difficult for us!
Melissa, just discovered this article – full of very good information. I’m wondering why I’m having such a hard time inviting people to a group board. Every time I start doing invites, after about 5-7 of them, Pinterest pops up this box that says “Whoa! Slow down there!”…and then I can’t invite anyone else until I save, exit and wait a bit and come back to try again. It is sooooo frustrating!
Also, I’m considering a contest for a client where we would do simliar to the Jetsetter example you mentioned above and have clues communicated through social media, then have folks find images from my client’s website to pin to a special board in answer to the clues. How can I have folks do this if they aren’t specifically invited to be pinners to the board? I just keep thinking that there has to be an easier/quicker way to create group boards!
Thanks fo your help!
I’m so glad this was helpful, Angela!
Since this article was written it seems that Pinterest has updated their rate limits on adding people. I believe they are doing this to make contests even harder to create – they seem to really dislike contests for whatever reason. I think the best bet for your client’s contest may be to have a specific name of the board users are to create. That way you can use Pinterest’s updated search engine, or an analytics tool, to find the boards with that name.
If you’d like some more in-depth information please feel free to email me at [email protected]!