Pinterest Best Practices: How to Get Results AND Stay Safe

It's official! Fresh content is likely to get a higher distribution priority!  Lucy Matthews, Partnerships Manager at Pinterest, explained at a Tailwind webinar today that fresh content is likely to get a higher distribution priority! The Pinterest algorithm has shifted towards favoring recent and relevant content. People come to the platform for new ideas and inspiration, so that's exactly what it wants to deliver. 

Pinterest marketers have seen this latest shift coming. The effectiveness of old pinning strategies and tactics has reduced. Quality over quantity is the new motto! The chances are extremely high that this change has implications for your current Pinterest content creation and distribution flow. To get more distribution and traffic and avoid the risk of being marked as spam, here are the Pinterest Best Practices that you MUST know about.

Fresh Pins are defined by Pinterest as images or videos that haven't been seen before. You can create several images for a single blog post or for a product in your online shop. When you save each image for the first time on Pinterest, each of these initial publications will be considered as fresh. You can create new content by publishing different images or videos that lead to the same URL. 

For example, for a blog article about healthy salad recipes, you could create a range of different images, each giving a slightly different spin and experience for Pinners. 

Significantly.

Here's what you should and shouldn't do:

Less is more! In other words, quality is more important than quantity. The Pinterest algorithm will pull up the best, most relevant and recent ideas first. To get more engagement and traffic, you must invest in content creation to maximize distribution of your content. Share fewer Duplicate Pins and more Fresh content.

If you schedule your pins with Tailwind or any other scheduling tool, you may be wondering if it's still safe to use features such as Board Lists and Looping. I must admit that I have been wondering about looping ever since Pinterest started to shift focus to Fresh content. Looping re-distributes Duplicate Pins at recurring intervals. By definition looped content is not fresh!

So, what's the answer? Tailwind works closely with Pinterest to address these questions and provides the following guidelines:

To help Pinners avoid pinning practices that may be considered spammy by Pinterest, Tailwind launched a new feature today called SmartGuide. The first version will warn you when your pinning activities reduce your overall reach or put your account at risk. It will also suggest easy fixes to maintain a healthy queue of scheduled Pins. In future versions, SmartGuide will keep you up-to-date with the latest Pinterest best practices.

SmartGuide is being rolled out in the coming weeks. Tailwind members who have this new feature enabled and are regularly publishing Pins via Tailwind will see the SmartGuide “All Clear” badge, as shown in the screenshot below. 

Here's a screenshot of what you might see if SmartGuide detects potentially risky behavior that might reduce your distribution or, worse, get your account blocked. You will be alerted, so that you can make the necessary adjustments before publishing. 

This latest update to Pinterest Best Practices for 2020 may require a significant change in pinning habits, as well as a major pinning schedule overhaul for many Pinterest marketers. For a start, Duplicate Pin restrictions will drastically reduce scheduled Pin queue sizes. To maintain (or regain) momentum on Pinterest, marketers need to become more creative with images. The good news is that new images will get a wider distribution, so if you play the game right, you will see more engagement and traffic.

There are plenty of scheduling tools out there, but Tailwind is by far my favorite tool for Pinterest! Want to know what alternatives are out there? Take a look at this very extensive list of social media tools (500+!) put together by Chris Makara.