How to Build a Solid Pinterest Strategy

Enid presented on the main stage at this year’s BlogHer Creators Summit in Brooklyn, New York. Recapped below, her session covers the foundation of a solid Pinterest strategy. To watch the whole session, you can view the video at the bottom on the page!

before you begin

1. Think about what your audience wants from you. What is your expertise? If you can understand their needs, it will impact your production.

Enid reminds the audience that Pinterest is personal media vs. social media. People come to Pinterest not to connect with others but to connect with themselves and what they want to achieve in their day to day lives. From a healthier diet, a new hairstyle, things to do with your kids or a wardrobe for Fall, more than 300 million people a month turn to Pinterest for ideas.

“Our mission is to provide everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.”

2. Pinterest is much more similar to a search engine than it is a social media platform.

Pinterest is reliant on high quality, inspirational content and YOU – the publisher – is what connects them to the ideas they’re looking for. Pinterest users are looking to connect with your content, not with you. They’re looking for images, videos, words that spark inspiration in them. They turn to Pinterest because they don’t already know what they want, they’re still in that early exploration stage. If they already knew exactly what they wanted for dinner to to wear to a holiday party, they likely wouldn’t need Pinterest.

Because Pinterest operates more like a search engine, evergreen content tends to perform better here than trending content or real time updates on your day to day life.

3. Understand that Pinterest is a great place to build an audience.

“97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded”

The Pinterest audience is unique in how open minded they are. They are united around the idea of exploring options, without already having a brand or product in mind. Users are looking to be inspired and then to take action.

Putting insights into action

1. Create a business profile – You can either start a new one or convert a personal account over to the business profile.

2. Claim your website and other social accounts from your Pinterest account – This allows for more analytics to be tracked on Pinterest. Other benefits to this include getting a follow button at the top of your page, a flexible profile cover, a monthly engagement numbers highlighted on your profile page and customizable profile tabs.

3. Start publishing content – There are multiple ways to get exposure on Pinterest. Once you publish a post, it will first appear on the Home feed of people who follow you. This is where the snowball of Pinterest Pin success begins.

“The more people that engage with your content, the more it gets shown”

If your followers engage well with your post, this sends positive signals to Pinterest to begin showing this content in Related Searches. Any time someone clicks into a pin, at the bottom of the page Pinterest populates it with other related content that they may like. Your content can also get traffic from being displayed in the Search Results. The more your followers engage with your content, and the more your content is shown in Related Searches, the higher it will appear in the search results.

“The average pin gets 50x more distribution to non followers than to followers”

Enid says to think of your follower count as the floor, not the ceiling. Your content has the potential to reach a much higher number of people than just your followers.

How to make the best content for pinterest

The three principles you should focus on to make exceptional Pinterest content are:

1. Quality

2. Frequency

3. SEO

Quality:

Enid used video as an example of quality content. For optimal Pinterest performance, the length of the video should be short and sweet. Since the video isn’t auto play, don’t reply on audio, instead utilize text overlap. The idea is to catch the user’s attention as they scroll through Pinterest.

Square or vertical images works best, they take up more real estate on the feed page in that format. Your Pin images should be high res, responsive and compelling and visually appealing.

Frequency:

When it comes to posting frequency, Enid says it’s much more important to be consistent in your posting. You should at least try to post once a week. Since Pinterest feeds aren’t organized in any way by a timestamp, great evergreen content can perform for years. And while there isn’t a peak time of day to post, Enid recommends leaning into seasonal content trends as much as possible. Know what seasonal moments are relevant for you and put your content out there at least one month in advance of the relevant holiday or time period.

Pinterest offers a native scheduling tool but also allow third party tools to help schedule posts.

SEO:

For each Pin, you should optimize the captions, titles and descriptions for each one. Use hyper-descriptive key phrases in all three of these locations. Write detailed descriptions, one to two human readable sentences. Include hashtags for popular search terms. Enid let us in on a little Pinterest hack with a quick way to discover what people search for most. You can start typing a term into the Pinterest search bar and it will auto-populate with the most popular terms.

You can watch Enid’s entire BlogHer Creators Summit presentation in the video below!