[0:00]Pinterest is a lot like Google in that it is a social media platform. It's unlike other platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Pinterest has said the average lifespan of a Pinterest pin is 13 and a half ish months. A lot longer than Instagram or TikTok. Frequency is becoming higher, especially with the rise of AI. So step number one is always going to be your keyword strategy. You're going to start with looking for keywords for your brand. So if you do have products and you can tag, you should do it. Pinterest is also really smart. It's going to serve their content to people in those regions. So if you do want to have a solid organic strategy and you want results faster, you should publish more. If you want to see a masterclass about Pinterest organic that cover everything that's just what we did with either Farris. It was very nice, a very nice talk with a lot and a lot of value and and a lot of tips about Pinterest. So yeah, thanks again for this interview and now let's switch to the content. That's my first podcast in English. So yeah, thanks to to to be here. Uh because yeah, I met you like a few weeks ago in in the Netherlands. You moved to the Netherlands. And uh yeah, I really love your content about what you are doing about Pinterest. So I'm pretty happy today to do this video together to cover like all the Pinterest um like strategies that we can have in 2025 and 2026. Uh so yeah, pretty happy uh. This Luke. So yeah, the goal today it will be to to share yes, the different strategies that um we can use on on Pinterest. And uh yeah, so to to start, maybe you can start with that, like for you, like why Pinterest is important uh in the marketing mix uh to to have in this year and how do you compare it compared to like Google or an Instagram? So Pinterest is a lot like Google in that it is a social media platform. It's unlike other platforms like Instagram or TikTok. I would say if I had to compare it on like a scale of likeness, it's more similar to TikTok these days than it is like Instagram because TikTok is so search friendly. Um but definitely more like Google than anything it's like a Google and like Instagram had a baby, it would be Pinterest. Like all, you know, image based, and these days it's becoming more video based as well. So you could go there, you can search for whatever you're looking for and go really, really deep. Yeah, and like for for a business is looking like to to try different uh traffic sources. Like normally when you are seeing like clients starting on Pinterest, some of the people are saying yeah, Pinterest can be very long, extra. Like what do you recommend in term of um time range to to start Pinterest and to get pretty nice results in organic first. I always tell people to give it at least six to nine months of consistency before you really throw the towel in and you really should probably give it longer than that. So what I like to coach people through is to make Pinterest just like a background operating system in your business. It's not going to be flashy at first. It's never going to have like big shiny results like an Instagram reel going viral and getting like two million views or something like that. But at the same time, it's it's building over time all of the Pinterest pins that you put on the platform, all of the keywords that you use help to build that visibility over the long term. So if you can give it a good solid six to nine months before you give up, I promise you'll start to see results. And for like um a brand or or someone that just want to start with Pinterest, what are the first steps you need to to, yeah, to to do and what's like the most important step and the most efficient also strategy that you can use to start well on on Pinterest? So step number one is always going to be your keyword strategy. You're going to start with looking for keywords for your brand. So I normally start with like a a few questions that people can answer about their brand or their business and their goals. Number one, what is it that you sell? You should know that really easily. Number two, what questions do you get asked all the time about your product or your service that you sell? Write those questions down and then what's the most common content that you create in your business and it could also be products that you're selling. Or Instagram posts that you're posting, like what are those topics? Write those down. And that's going to be like the starting point for your keyword strategy. So if you come to me and you tell me that you sell leather bags, we're going to go on Pinterest and we're going to search for leather bags. But we're also going to search for how to care for leather bags, how to travel with leather bags, can I have a leather bag in the rain? Like those most common topics that people are searching for. And do you have some tips to search those topics with Reddit or with Google or with Pinterest trends? Pinterest and Pinterest trends, you mentioned that so that's just trends.pinterest.com. And then the search bar is a really solid place just to start getting some ideas, but the trends tool is my favorite and depends on the brand, the industry or niche and kind of what they're doing. Some stuff might not show in the trends tool, so that's kind of where you need to default to either the search bar or you could even use the ads manager, which you teach a lot about. So the ads manager keyword search tool might be a place for you to start as well. Yeah yeah, completely. So first step, it's keywords strategy. Step number two, boards strategy. So all of the like categories of things that you have in your business, think big umbrella topics. Those become boards. So if it's leather coats, leather bags, leather purses, leather shoes, those are individual boards. And then all of the pins, which is step number three, that you're going to create, that's our creative. Our creative is their Pinterest pins, image pins or video pins, those then go on each of those silo topic boards. So that's step number three. And for those boards, do you suggest just to have classic boards or also like sub boards, I don't know what's the name. Sections, that what you're asking? Yeah. Um, so I always kind of have a a test, like a means test sort of. If if the topic, if you have enough pins to put into the subtopic or the section of a Pinterest board, it should be its own board. But if you don't have enough to fill that out, you could create a section. Okay. So second step, the the boards, and for the covers of the board, we have some best practice. I love board covers. And a lot of Pinterest experts do not suggest creating them, but they are always my top pins in my, yes, the square one. Okay. Super simple, solid background color, really easy to read font. If you do that, you can look at my board covers and you can just copy mine, okay? It's fine. Um, you can cheat off my work. Um, they work every single time. I just, I'm wrapping up month two with a brand new client and the top pins are board covers mixed with pins that I've created. Okay. For mine, every month, there's a board cover in the top ten rotation. And the best practice is just square, text um visible in the center. Yes, and it's normally just the title of the board. So if the board is leather coats, then it's leather coats. We don't need to put a lot of no, we don't need to do a logo, you don't need to do imagery if you don't want to. You could get fancy if you would like to, okay, you can, but you don't have to. And for the like the unity of the boards, do you recommend to have one template for for every board or we can, you can mix and match. I believe mine are even mixed and matched between like three different templates. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So yeah, I think, and for also like the URL destination, do you suggest to um to try different one or if someone don't have a lot of uh links to to put in on? Like, what do you suggest um to to create um like different redirection or not everything in the on page? Pinterest does like fresh content and fresh being new, but fresh can also mean just a new image with the same URL. So, they don't look at copy at all. So, believe it or not when they're looking at the image to determine if it's fresh or not, that's it, that's all they're looking at is the image. So if you have one URL and you wanted to share it ten times this week, create ten images. Yeah. That's great. You could use the same title and description each time if you wanted to. Now, I know say why you would want to do that, you you do want to mix it up and try to target new keywords with each variety. And then you could go a level deeper and target different boards with each one. And that will help you with further indexing, but at the end of the day, if you have a very limited amount of URLs, just make more images.
[9:16]Yeah. And before that, is it important to put like a rich pin option and such a fake it or Yeah. I you should always have your website claimed because Pinterest does see that as profile completeness and they also see that as just trust that this is a real human and not a bot account, so you're less likely to get swept up in the spam filter that way. Um, you also have some kind of backing if someone steals your pins and you go to Pinterest and you're like, hey, what they're going to be like, is your website claimed? Claim your website. Um, so yes, you should claim your website and then put the pixel also. Pixel always. Come on. Even if you're not running ads yet, it's data collection.
[10:06]While we can and with thin reason, um, what was your other question?
[10:24]Um, no, it was about, uh, yeah, the the claim and rich pin also. Rich pins. Okay, for rich pins. I have always told clients just to turn them on. It's so easy to do. It's a user experience feature, not a reach feature. So for user experience, the Pinterest pin will just get a little bit of extra information on it, including a follow button on the pin when they interact with your pin. And there's some industry if I'm right about like for instance, recipes, type of Rich Pinos that works better, maybe. Yes, so in the food industry, there is it will Pinterest will connect and read your recipe card and it will put a handful of the items from the recipe card in the list. It will not put it all in there and no one will be able to know exactly how to make your recipe from this pin. So fret not, they will still need to go to your website. Yes, that's perfect. And which kind of KPIs Pinterest is looking to um to follow up on pins to go viral. Is it like the number of click on the pins, click on the website? It's engagement overall on the Pinterest pins themselves. So the more engagement your pins get, the more likely they are to go viral. So engagement is click on the pin, save. What else? Um, pin clicks, outmount clicks, saves. Those are the three most important impression, or three most important engagement functionalities, but there's also comments, pin likes and people can send your pins to other people. In their DMs, so it's like they can only send it to one like private message box and that's it. They can't like mass send it to people. Those are the most common three and the most important three are pin clicks, amound clicks and saves. And what do you say to people that saying like, oh, I want to to get a lot of followers on Pinterest. You don't need them. Even Pinterest says you don't need them. They're not even something that Pinterest tracks in your analytics dashboard. Um, what they do track are impressions, engaged users, your total audience and then those engagement metrics we just mentioned. So pin clicks, outmount clicks and saves. Those at the top, when you go to your analytics overview, that is what you're going to see and that's what Pinterest cares about, that's why it's at the top. You can obviously look at things like um breakdowns by demographic. So if you want to see who is interacting with your pins, what age group they're in, what gender they are, um where they're located in the world, you can look at all of that information. Followers is something they don't care about because people don't need to follow you to be served your content. Yeah. And let's talk about um like the demographic thing. Because some of the people for instance, if I want to sell in Australia, um how can I make sure that I will target this type of agency in ads. It's easy just need to see the country, Australia. Um but for organic, do you have some tips to target only certain country or it's not possible at all? Usually it's within keywords. So in your title in your description, more likely in your description than your title, but um I have a new client starting actually in November and they are located in Australia and they only sell to Australia, New Zealand. Okay. And they want organic setup, maybe eventually they'll run some ads, but because that's where they're located, Pinterest is also really smart. It's going to serve their content to people in those regions. Because they will engage more in Yeah, they'll because their account is Australian, they'll be more likely to to be served to Australian. And maybe Pinterest is looking also about the domain, is it not the domain.com.au? Yeah. Yeah. Because there the website's going to be claimed and all of that.
[14:21]So there on the engagement side of things, they're more likely to be served pins to Australia and New Zealand, because that's that's the region that they're in. But also you can kind of tip the scale a little bit by putting keywords related to your country or city or neighborhood within a city even if you wanted to go that far. In the description of the Pinterest pins. Yeah. And what's the most important between um like how how Pinterest rank between the text in on the pins, on the title, on the description and for the links uh the URL you you told before that it's not the case now. So they don't, they do have the ability to scan the website on the other side. So even what you're linking to is weighted in the overall relevancy score, but it's it's basically like all built out based on relevancy. So is the keyword, is the image of the actual pin related to the keyword and the words that you put in the description are they related? Does it all make sense? Is it relevant to the product or service that you're selling and also the user who's searching for it? So all of that's kind of weighted together. Um, you Pinterest can read the image, so if you don't put text on top of the image, that's fine. They can still read the image and see that it's a a woman in a, you know, whatever outfit holding a leather bag. Okay, that's our example for today's leather bags. Um, they can see that, but also they're going to see the title and the description and the link that it's going to, and they can see what's on the other side. So just make sure all of those things are really highly relevant and you should be okay. Yeah. And about um like shopping uh shopping thing, do you suggest to to to tag every pins to the shopping catalog? Yes, that's actually it it takes so much time. You can do it before, you can do it after. You cannot do it with third party schedulers right now. So you have to do it with Pinterest or not at all. Um, okay. So this this layout is likely going to change. It always does, but Pinterest just this year in like the last quarter to two quarters of this year, so second quarter, third quarter, released a new layout on Pinterest. So when you open it up, depending on what region you're in even, like it's even country dependent. When you open up and you click on a pin and you make it bigger on your screen, that's called a pin click. Off to the right and underneath it are all Pinterest search results. I hate it. It's horrible. So if you do have products and you can tag them, it'll actually bump those results down. Those other organic results from everyone else down and your stuff will be right at the top along with your Pinterest pin. So if you do have products and you can tag, you should do it. Yeah, because if not, you will have your competitors. Yeah, on top of uh on the search bar. Not the search bar but the the top section. I have another tip and it involves a setting in your account. And this is you need to go into your Pinterest settings and I can't remember exactly which label it is. I can follow up with you later, maybe we can put it in the description of the video. But there is a setting in the backend of your Pinterest account where you can turn off other people's pin recommendations being placed on top of yours. So if you are selling e-commerce products and you are your competitor's products are being tagged in yours because they also sell furniture or home goods or whatever. You can actually turn that off where it will not tag your competitor's products in the recommended section on the right. Okay. So I think everyone should turn that off because you don't need your competitor's stuff being recommended next to yours. And do you have any suggestion about like which scheduler to to use to be at high frequency on Pinterest?
[18:52]And also um until like if if someone are publishing one pins per day, maybe it's not um necessary to use a scheduler and maybe at at a certain frequency it's needed, when? Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you the guidelines that they are right now for Pinterest. So the native Pinterest scheduler on Pinterest is totally free to use. You can schedule your content up to 30 days in advance. But you can only have one hundred pins scheduled at a time, and then it's maxed and you have to publish some pins to clear up some space. So their server capacity. I don't know if they will change because Isn't great. I don't think they will honestly, when they put a tool out for years, that is what it is. And for the last two years, we've had the same scheduler and they have a new one, but it's not even released to everybody. So here's to answer your question, which scheduler. I use Tailwind the most for myself and for clients. They for a while, we kind of took a reprieve from using Tailwind and we were using Pinterest for a lot of our newer clients because they were coming to us without a scheduler. So we just default to Pinterest. But if you are wanting to amp up your frequency per day and you're wanting to schedule more than one pin per day, knowing that you cannot product tag with third party schedulers, Tailwind is great. I do love them. They have improved the ability to publish video pins with their platform as well. The video pin performance as far as like the quality of the video and like the pixelation used to be lower, but they seem to have fixed some of those issues. So you can even publish videos with them. You can add covers to your videos, you can schedule to multiple boards if you wanted to. You can schedule to sections. I do believe inside of Tailwind. I believe that's an update. Don't carry, don't hold me to that. Yeah. And I'm curious um, because we are using a lot also Tailwind. What are like the features that you like the most?
[21:09]Yeah. I so they have a lot of new features that are coming this fall that I cannot wait to get my hands on.
[21:19]But right now, today, my favorite feature is um the ability to, like obviously, pin from my website. Because I I embed images in each of my blog posts and you can also pull products through their scheduler feature, like the Chrome extension. I really like the ability to though, to make pins in Canva and then export them straight to Tailwind drafts. And no longer have to download it to my computer, unzip the file, upload it to Tailwind, then put all the copy in there. Straight inside of Canva, you can connect your Tailwind account. You can put the description, you can put the title, you can apply the boards. And then you export it to Tailwind. You can do this with videos, you can do this with images, you can do it with multiple. Um right now, I have a strategy for one of my clients where I make ten pins per blog. I export all ten of those with the title, the description, the link already there and the boards. Yeah. I just edit the boards around a little bit once it's in the Tailwind drafts, and then I schedule them all. My second favorite feature is pin spacing. They do still have the ability to do intervals if you publish to three boards, that's going to be an interval of whatever you set. Pin spacing, for my ten pins per client, I set it to seven days, so every seven days one of those will go out. So I can schedule the first pin and then select all and click schedule, and they automatically fall in line wherever they should go. Love that feature. Another feature I like so, so right now, but it's going to get better because they're releasing some updates. I believe November, December time frame is the smart pin feature. So you can put in a URL and you can upload the images you want it to use to make the pins. One of the features that they are testing around with is to kind of adopt your template style. So if you already have templates in Canva that you really like, they're going to be able to kind of mimic and adopt those, that's really cool. And you'll also be able to edit the text with smart pin coming in in the near future. So I love that too because I don't always like the words that they come up with. And yeah, and also like what what are you using for for analytics because there is a section in Tailwind about the analytics. Tailwind analytics are actually really, really good. And they they have the ability to see further back than the Pinterest dashboard. So you're you're limited at six months on Pinterest of seeing your pin data. So I always tell people just export it every single month, whether you use it or not, you need to export every single report for pin clicks, outmount clicks, saves. All the engagement, there's five engagement filters. Export them for your top pins for all five engagement filters, and then export an overall monthly view. Um whichever report you want to be defaults, I usually default to impressions. And then I export all of the data and just save them the CSV files in a Google Drive. That way I can look back on it later. Whether I look at it right now or in three months or nine months, I still have the data to look at. And I can start to build trends over time. I can start to see kind of what people were doing. And you're going to notice in your analytics, whether you do it on Tailwind or Pinterest, like there are certain behaviors that happen at the same exact time every single year. Yeah. And you can put all those data to chat GPT also you can and I actually built a a bot where I built an audit kind of documentation out for it. So I upload all the the CSV files for the data. I clear I have to clean it up because chat GPT's not good at reading the header files or whatever. So I clean it up, I import it into, and I have it audit the data for me. I have like preset questions in my own bot that it will ask. It'll prompt and you answer them and it'll it'll help you along. I also love using it for, like you said, generating titles and descriptions. I will feed it lists of keywords and the product listing, what it's about, the audience it's for, all of that stuff. And it will create those titles and descriptions for me. I also like using it to take blog posts and turn them into infographic pins. So it's not creating the image, it's creating the list of content that would go on the infographic, and then I take it and I put it into the, And are you using a lot Canva AI on that? No, Um, but I do like using the Canva Bolt Create functionality. So when I do the infographic method I just said, I'll put it into a spreadsheet and then I'll feed the spreadsheet to the Bolt Create and it will make the pins for me and then I just need to edit them. Yeah. And in time, in term of AI, are you using more chat GPT or cloud? Because on our side, like for like a reflection strategy, etcetera, chat GPT is better. But for like texts with a lot of context, Claud it's better at the time. I know if you tried. I've gone back and forth. I built my bot in chat GPT, so that's where I'm at. Um it's super affordable. I don't I think Claud is also, I think Claud is actually cheaper than chat GPT. Yes. It depends on the plan. Yeah, yeah. Um but the good thing is you can put in Claud also like projects. So it's almost the same as the GPT in in chat GPT, but you can create project and and think is you can sometimes chat GPT have having like a limit in term of characters that you are using. If you are putting a lot and a lot of data and Claud did like a lot of update to to increase that. But for reflection and strategy, um yeah, chat GPT is better. Yeah, I just use chat GPT for now and I do project files. So each of my clients gets a custom project file. I have a custom about my business worksheet for them. Keywords, everything is loaded into it. Um and then everything that comes out I self-edit.
[27:53]So I don't just take what it gives me and run with it. I edit it. Yeah. And let's get back about like Pinterest also, we didn't talk about like the longevity of the content. Yeah. Um really good question. So it the Pinterest has set the average lifespan of a Pinterest pin is 13 and a half ish months. But I've noticed in my client accounts, um personally that pins will show up five, six, seven years later. Like continue driving. They become legacy pins almost. Like pins that got a lot of reach or got a lot of engagement, if you still have that content, especially, that's why it's such a good evergreen platform. If you still have those topics that content, those products or whatever, and you're still selling them all these years later, like it can still become a powerhouse years later. So, yeah, it's a lot longer than Instagram or TikTok. Yeah. Amazing. Thanks a lot for all the info. That's why it was like a complete master class. So yeah, thanks a lot and uh, if people want to know more about uh what you are uh doing about your social network, uh how can I really use the people? Just my website is fine, heatherfarris.com.
