Best Pinterest Practices from Pinterest’s Culture & Community Manager Enid Hwang

How many times a day do you ask yourself “How can I drive more traffic to my website?”

For our community, driving traffic is a top priority. So, we interviewed Pinterest’s Culture & Community Manager, Enid Hwang, to find out ways to properly utilize Pinterest to drive traffic to your blogs, optimize your Pinterest for SEO, use Pinterest for Creators, and so much more. It’s important to incorporate Pinterest in to your social media strategy to help reach untapped audiences, drive traffic, and encourage engagement. We hope some of the tools Enid has suggested will help you achieve #websitegoals!

Why is it important for bloggers to utilize Pinterest?

Pinterest is a great way to reach new audiences, get your content discovered, and drive traffic to your site since more than 367 million people a month are actively looking for inspiration and ideas on topics from bucket list getaways to what to make for dinner.

Plus, content on Pinterest can be constantly shared, saved, and rediscovered over time, delivering you engagement and traffic for months or even longer.

As creators, you put so much time and effort into your work: Pinterest helps you get meaningful, unpaid reach—not just restricted to your followers—and gives the opportunity for your content to be evergreen unlike social networks where a post might only be discoverable for a day.

How can bloggers use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs?

Great content on Pinterest represent ideas, not just pretty pictures or videos. Creators should definitely be making sure all their content on Pinterest links to the landing pages or posts that make the most sense, so when a Pinner is ready to buy that product, try that tutorial, or read that city guide, they can go right to the source for more.

It’s also very helpful to add Pinterest Save buttons on your site to encourage your existing audience to save your content to their own Pinterest boards. This helps content from your domain get more distribution across Pinterest without too much work on your part.

What tools, such as the Rich Pins Validator, do you recommend bloggers use?

We have a great one-stop-shop for creators for best practices and news, but the key tools we recommend are:

1. Be sure to claim your domain and social accounts (Instagram, YouTube, and Etsy). Claiming gives you attribution for any Pins created by other people from those accounts, along with insights and stats on how those Pins are performing. 

2. Add Rich Pins to your website. Rich Pins show helpful metadata—such as ingredients for recipes or the price for products—right on the Pin itself, giving Pinners a richer experience and increasing engagement.

3. Use Pinterest Analytics to understand how your content is performing. Plus, Audience Insights shows you what topics your followers are most interested in: It’s a great tool for planning content ideas as well as identifying keywords/trends to optimize your content further.

4. Play with new formats: Video is growing on Pinterest with views of organic video Pins up 240% year over year—particularly driven by food, beauty, DIY, entertainment, and home decor. Record in vertical mode whenever possible along with our other video content best practices.

5. Upload and highlight your products for more reach. Pinterest’s new app with Shopify makes it easier than ever to upload your product catalog to Pinterest and turn your items into shoppable Product Pins, in just a few clicks. The app automatically creates a connection between your store and Pinterest, so you don’t need to edit code for this integration.

How can a blogger optimize their Pinterest for SEO?

Keywords and SEO are a cornerstone of a great Pinterest strategy for creators. We definitely recommend…

Making sure you title your boards with search-friendly keywords, ie: “Travel ideas” is better than “Wanderlust.”

Write search-friendly titles for your Pins.

Then spend a little bit of time writing descriptions for each of your Pins: These should include important, relevant keywords in a couple human-readable sentences. For instance, if it’s a recipe, include the key ingredients, type of preparation method, or any dietary notes people might search. For travel, you’d want to include the town/city, country, or maybe even continent or type of travel, ie: Adventure, romantic, or budget-friendly.

Lastly, add a handful of relevant hashtags to echo keywords that would help your content get discovered, ie: #Vegetarian would be better than a hyper-specific #veg4life.

How would you describe the Pinterest community?

Pinners are open-minded and actively seeking new inspiration that’ll be additive to their lives. Fundamentally, they’re on Pinterest to find ideas that fit their taste, their passions, and their hobbies or projects, so what I love most about the Pinterest community is the creativity, positivity, and feeling of exploration. It’s a platform to connect with yourself and what you want in your life, not with others, and I think that’s increasingly valuable nowadays.

Who are some of your favorite pinners to follow for inspiration?

I love Pinch of Yum for recipes: Every single dish I’ve made are wins at the dinner table.

Bon Traveler has gorgeous travel inspiration and really informative guides: She’s the one who literally put Mallorca on my travel map. And Accidental Icon is a fellow New Yorker who is everything style goals. 

What new Pinterest tools for creators have been released in 2020? What new tools can we expect to see this year? 

In addition to our partnership with Shopify, we launched our Shopping Spotlights feature which showcases a curated selection of products chosen by influencers and publishers from folks like Elaine Welteroth, Blair Eadie, and Sarah Sherman Samuelson. Both tools make for an easier and more inspiring shopping experience overall.

We’ve also added Adobe Spark, Over, PicMonkey and Canva to our Pinterest Partner Program, making it easier for creators to identify trusted creative partners for services and tools like creating, designing, editing and publishing. 

We’re continuing to develop tools for creators, so stay tuned! We plan to announce a few new exciting updates that will roll out over the next couple of months. 

We were thrilled to have Enid answer your Pinterest questions at #BlogHer20 Creators Summit. Watch Now!

Enid Hwang Pin To Win at #BlogHer20 Creators Summit