16 Mar 2020 Pinterest Best Practices – How to Get Compliant

Are you up to date on the 2020 Pinterest Best Practices? Did you know that mass-Pinning the same content to dozens of group boards with hundreds of thousands of followers day after day may not be the best strategy to get your Pins in front of more viewers…and that it could actually get you penalized? Find out how to modify your Pinterest marketing strategy to comply with Pinterest’s latest changes!

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“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” —John F. Kennedy

If you’re a blogger (or anyone with a smartphone, in fact), you know that social media is constantly changing. Do you ever wonder why your marketing strategy that’s attracting new followers and loads of engagement one year, month or day might result in crickets the next?

Consumers’ preferences change. Shocking, I know. 😱 And as social media platforms gather data and discover new ways to more effectively engage their users, they change the way our content reaches our current and potential audience.

Thankfully, Pinterest shared with us some big changes to their algorithms this year in a YouTube Live interview with Tailwind on February 11, 2020, so we don’t have to guess what’s going on.

 

What are the 2020 Pinterest Best Practices?

Pinterest announced in February this year it is increasingly favoring fresh, new, high-quality Pins. Home feeds are now leaning towards more “recent and relevant content” and will continue to do so more as the year goes on.

New content will be more readily available to viewers in the home feed and search results as opposed to older images. Pinterest rep Lucy Matthews confirmed these changes are already in process of being implemented but will continue to progress throughout 2020 and beyond.

 Does this mean all of your old blog posts are useless now? Absolutely not! This does mean, however, you may need to put a little elbow grease into refreshing your existing content by creating brand new Pins.

Pinterest defines fresh pins as images or videos that they haven’t seen before. You can, however, still link to previous content as long as the image is new.

How Will the 2020 Pinterest Best Practices Help Me?

Your newly published content may receive higher viewability and more engagement than it would have in the past, paving the way for new blog posts to go viral.

How Do I Create Fresh Pins for Existing Content?

Fresh content is defined as new images or videos.  

Pinterest confirmed that changing a Pin description or updating hashtags, repositioning an image or resizing it, adding a filter, etc., will not constitute fresh content. You need new angles of your subject, new background images, text overlays, etc.

Matthews encouraged us to create unique images that are “helpful and inspiring” to Pinners, saying “the better you are at that, the more future-proof your process and strategy will be.”

 If you’re saving to a lot of boards, use as many different images as possible. Roll them out over several weeks with Tailwind’s SmartSchedule.

Will I be penalized for sharing duplicate content? 

Possibly.

Pinterest confirmed “duplicate content will be distributed less or seen by smaller audiences compared to fresher content” and that accounts sharing “far too much duplicate content could see suspension or penalties […] although spam algorithms are in place to protect creators.”

Exact algorithms are not published to protect against abusers, but Pinterest does work with partners like Tailwind to guide content creators like you and me from outdated and frowned-upon practices.

Other Pinners resaving your content from your blog and rePinning your older “stale” Pins are perfectly acceptable and positive behaviors.

Will I be penalized for saving others’ older Pins relevant to my audience?

No. This is natural and helpful behavior across Pinterest if you think it’s relevant to your audience, Pinterest explained.

Pinterest assures us we can still ask questions to our Tailwind admins and Pinterest will work with them to provide clarity.

How is Tailwind helping with the 2020 Pinterest best practices?

Tailwind has implemented SmartGuide to analyze your Pinterest activity and ensure it adheres to the current best practices. As a Pinterest partner, Tailwind will continue to evolve with Pinterest’s best practices. Tailwind’s SmartGuide is actively monitoring for subscriber activity inching toward Pinterest’s definition of spammy. Per Tailwind, the SmartGuide will notify us of any unfavorable activity noted in both our regular activity and SmartLoops. 

Right now, SmartGuide is mostly focused on preventing us from behaviors that will impede our marketing strategy, but in the future Tailwind plans to add features and logic that will help guide us toward positive behavior to help our content reach a wider audience as well such as identifying which content is ready for a refresh.

 

What is Tailwind, you ask?

Besides being a blogger’s best friend, it’s a feature-rich application that helps you stay on top of your social media marketing. It’s basically a scheduler, analytics tool, networking platform and source of fresh new content all rolled into one service.

With Tailwind’s Pinterest SmartSchedule, you can choose how many Pins you want to share per day and at what times. You can group several boards into custom-created lists and Pin one image to several different boards at different times with the click of a button.

For each Pin, you can choose to fill in your next open time slots, pick a set interval that works for you, or even set it for some date in the future if you have seasonal content you want going out at a later time.

My Farmstead Chic Pinterest account has seen significant growth (50-100 followers per week lately) just by staying active on Pinterest, something I would never have the time to do without Tailwind.*

What are Tailwind Tribes?

Tailwind Tribes are Member-created groups where you can help each other grow by sharing each other’s relevant content. When you schedule a new Pin, you are given the option to share it to a Tribe and/or add it to a SmartLoop as well.

Tribes are especially helpful when sourcing new content to share to your boards. I can spend an hour each month queueing up fresh content for boards and then not worry about staying active or keeping my followers engaged for weeks. I go back in and add my new blog post Pins to the Schedule as I create them, using interval time slots to make sure I am not sharing the same content too often.

When choosing a Tribe, be sure to pick one that aligns with your niche, only allows quality content and enforces resharing activity. Tribes is a Tailwind PowerUp. At the time of this post, the basic Tailwind Plus plan is $15 per month per social account (with a discounted annual option) and includes five Tribes memberships and 30 Tribes submissions per month. Upgrades are available. Below is an example of a Tribe I created in 2019 and the results of our cooperation so far.*

What are Tailwind SmartLoops?

SmartLoops are a way to automate your most popular or seasonal content. With SmartLoops, you can pick your most engaging Pins to be reshared, decide if they are Evergreen or Seasonal, choose the frequency, and pick which boards they should be shared to. You can even set up rules for individual group boards so you don’t share too often.

SmartLoops is a Tailwind PowerUp. At the time of this post, the basic Tailwind Plus plan is $15 per month per social account (with a discounted annual option) and includes 250 active SmartLoop posts. An active SmartLoop post is defined as one Pin to one board. Upgrades are available. 

What is Tailwind’s SmartGuide? 

Tailwind recently implemented SmartGuide to help us know if our Pinning patterns are throwing up any red flags or leaning towards spammy based on teh 2020 Pinterest best practices.  If you’re not getting notifications, rest assured it’s running in the background. Tailwind CEO Danny Maloney assures us they will continue to update this logic to stay within known best practices as Pinterest continues to evolve and they continue to learn more.

In the future, SmartGuide will add additional features such as guiding us toward possible improvements on our activity to better reach our audience like identifying which content is ready for a refresh.

If you don’t have Tailwind, you can use this link to sign up for a free trial to see how your Pinterest activity ranks on their SmartGuide technology.

What else can Tailwind do you for? 

I also use Tailwind for my Instagram posting as well. Let’s just be real. I don’t have the time, energy or patience to post to Instagram consistently two to three times per day. I spend one day per month scheduling a months’ worth of posts, and then I schedule my new content manually when necessary. I love that I can see a preview of how my feed will look once posted, and I can always fit in additional posts, stories and highlights as I see fit.

If I post an impromptu photo to my feed not using Tailwind, I always go back to the analytics page to see how my post resonated with my audience and also to see how my future feed looks in case I need to make changes. 

How do I get Tailwind? 

If you don’t have Tailwind, you can use this link to sign up for a free trial. 

*These are my personal results, but Tailwind also publishes the Typical Results of Tailwind for Pinterest/Instagram Members every year, so you can see exactly what the average growth rate looks like for their members.

• Typical Results for Tailwind for Pinterest members can be found here: https://blog.tailwindapp.com/typical-results-of-tailwind-for-pinterest-members/
• Typical Results for Tailwind for Instagram members can be found here: https://blog.tailwindapp.com/typical-results-of-tailwind-for-instagram-members/

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