5 things you should be doing on Pinterest

Has your Pinterest traffic dropped?

You are not alone! Many who have been on Pinterest for years have noticed a drop in traffic and impressions. It’s left many people wondering what they are doing wrong and convinced that Pinterest hates them.

That is far from the truth! Pinterest love their Creator community. After all, they need Creators to make content. But Pinterest wants to be more like Instagram.

Pinterest has been rolling out major changes to its algorithms since late 2020. Everything points to Pinterest wanting ‘Creators’ (those who make pins and content) to connect more with ‘Pinners’ (those who browse Pinterest content and pin ideas they like and want to share).

Tailwind recently conducted a study of more than 20 million pins to see what was going on. Here are insights you can use to improve your traffic and connect more with your followers and Pinners.

5 things you should be doing on Pinterest right now to improve your impressions and traffic

1. Make more Story Pins

Pinterest is giving lots of love to Creators who make story pins. The Tailwind research showed that new Story Pins gets 41% more saves compared to static pins. That reason alone is huge and why you should try them. The research also found story pins really took off for Creators with more than 10k followers.

Recently introduced, Story Pins are multi-page pins which tell a ‘story’ and engage followers. They are a different direction for Pinterest and a step towards user engagement (instead of just being a search engine for content). Like them or hate them, YOU HAVE TO MAKE THEM.

How to create good Story Pins (aka “Idea” Pins)

Pinterest has created Story Pins to keep users on the platform, so don’t be tempted to have a link on your story pin to your site. What’s in it for you is followers. Instead of a link, have a strong call to action, such as a ‘Follow me’ button.

When creating your Story Pin, the first panel is the most important. You can optimise views by using video in your first panel. Also make your story pin at least 5 panels. For bloggers, use the story pin to tell a story. You can have several takes on your blog post (think of the ways different audiences can use the information in your blog post).

2. Make more video pins

There are nearly 1 billion video views on Pinterest each day. You should be a part of that. Tailwind’s research showed that 30% of high-performing pins used video. Some of them were reused from TikTok (psst — ensure the TikTok logo is not showing or the algorithm will pick that up). Tailwind found performance seemed to be especially relevant to Creators with less than 10k followers.

3. Make new Pin images (aka “fresh pins”)

Pinterest used to be about curating content. Now it’s about new, fresh content. It’s worth knowing some of the terminology. ‘Image Creates’ refers to the first time an image goes on to Pinterest. ‘Image Saves’ refers to any subsequent times the Pin is saved. Pinterest goes wild for ‘Image Creates’. Think of it as Pinterest having millions of users and it getting very excited when it has something new to share with its users. Pin more Image Creates, a new images and a new post URL, perform about 4x better than repins. Jen Stanbrook is the guru for this stuff if you want to find out more.

4. Claim your website

This seems like a very basic thing to do, but you need to claim your website on Pinterest. Tailwind’s research showed that those who have their domains on Pinterest enjoyed 80% than average engagement rates than those who did not. And keep checking that it is claimed – some users have reported becoming ‘unclaimed’. You can claim 1 domain (and subdomains), 1 Instagram, 1 Etsy and 1 YouTube.

5. Get Tailwind

If you are serious about Pinterest, you need to get the Tailwind app. It’s mainstay is Pinterest scheduling, which you absolutely need if you want to schedule pins with regularity. But it’s new CREATE feature actually makes pins for you. On average it takes just under 2 minutes to create a fresh pin using the CREATE feature. With Canva it averages 15 minutes. You can easily create more Image Creates using Tailwind CREATE.

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