Show Notes:
If you think Pinterest doesn’t drive traffic to your website, think again.
This week’s episode, Alisa Meredith from Tailwind shares Pinterest strategies that actually work.
3:16 Alisa’s backstory
13:19 How to start creating content that is actually going to drive traffic
Transcript:
Hello, my precious blueberries. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m so excited to have you here, this guest, because she has been in my inbox for years now and I am so glad that I finally get to have a conversation with her. I am being joined with by Elisa Meridith. Elisa is a Pinterest product specialist and marketing manager. Talin she is a sought after speaker and teacher on the topic of Pinterest marketing and Pinterest adds She’s spoken in social media marketing world agents of change appear on the art of page traffic in the Social Prose podcast, and she has been graciously giving her time to come talk to me SEO.
She runs a digital agency since 2005, which now focused primarily on Pinterest as she lives in paints in coastal North Carolina with Pepi’s, a couch potato covered view and more cats than she’d like to admit to. But she’s going to admit to how many she has right now.
I am OK. I have four.
Oh, OK. That’s well, it was a like a rescue failure, right? So we had this neighborhood cat house and we thought, well, we’ll get them all trapped. Neuter released. Right. And there were two letters of little adorable, irresistible kittens. And we thought, OK, well, we’ll just we’ll foster then we’ll get them healthy and then we’ll adopt them out. No, I know, no, I think we we adopted two out, and plus I ended up with one of the adults who was like, hey, this is a good deal.
I’m standing here doing.
Yeah, they’ll probably show up on the back of my chair at some point. They usually do when I’m talking.
That’s if you hear some scratching later on. That’s my cab buddy who very much when we close the door.
Oh yes, they do. At a closed door. OK, I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. If I do this, does it make you feel like I’m in your email?
Absolutely. I can’t believe that I get to see the person who’s been for some purpose. Let’s start with your marketing agency. How did you get started with this? And then how did you start going over to tell and give me that whole journey?
Yeah, well, I’ll try to make it short because it started a long time ago and probably in nineteen ninety eight or nine where I was doing contact marketing before I really called it that and went from that to website development. And that was, it wasn’t really good at all, but I just kept doing it because that’s what I kind of knew how to do. And then I got to social media and then I got into inbound in the agency that I that I owned with partner became a HubSpot agency.
And then Pinterest came out like, what is this thing and how could a business use it? So I wrote an e-book about that in my attempt to learn, which probably sounds familiar to a lot of people listening. If you want to learn something, you’re right about it. You teach it. So that led to my first client with Pinterest. And the results that we got with him were just they’re kind of addictive. So so I was hooked on Pinterest and I have been ever since.
And then I started a new agency on my own. I don’t even know what year that was, but focus on Pinterest and then moved more to Pinterest advertising.
And then how did you join up with talent?
Talent. So if anyone wanted me to work with them on their Pinterest account, they had to have a talent account. It was part of the contracts because I just couldn’t do it without it. So I knew the products. I love the products. I thought their customer support or customer success team was amazing. Then I got to meet Danny, the owner, and Melissa, who is in marketing and has been there forever, social media marketing world. And we did some marketing together and I just really like if they were representative of see and Danny and Melissa were what talent was then like a good team to join.
So I did four years ago.
And what made you decide, OK, I’m going to take over their email engagement or were they like, please just take our email engagement? How did that work out?
Oh, I don’t. So awesome.
Yeah. Yeah, no I don’t. So I do sometimes write emails off and review emails, but a lot of it is just comes from me because it’s a topic. Right. It’s about Pinterest and people know me as a face of of tail and Pinterest. So some of it I write, some of it I haven’t. But yeah that’s it’s a very small part of what I do.
It’s very so the reason that I really wanted to talk to you is because I feel like entrepreneurs sleep on Pinterest, like so many people get worried about Instagram or Tik Tok or not clubhouse and think I feel like Pinterest has been such a driver for my business that I just want to grab everybody and treat them like you are missing out on so much with this. So let’s talk about Pinterest. Let’s talk about why people should be focusing on that either instead of other social media networks or with in addition to social media networks.
Yeah. So Pinterest, I and I have felt this way for years. Right. It’s such a great missed opportunity. And up until now it’s been a fantastic traffic driver and I think it still is a good traffic driver. It’s really changing, though. So if you’ve not been on Pinterest before, you don’t have those expectations. What you have now is a very different Pinterest where Pinterest really wants to get Pinners to connect with creators. So they’re really heavy into idea Pinners which where story pins up until last week or so.
So it is becoming more, more social. And more of kind of an influencer space, but there is still traffic to be had from those static pins and video Pinners as well. So, yeah, if you haven’t tried it yet, I absolutely would. And try to try a variety of those Pinners and the traffic you can get potentially very, very meaningful.
So talking about these idea Pinners, I’m frustrated with them because I know that they’re meant to just keep people on and sort of moving people off the app. But do you feel that they do have a value?
Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, we’re here and I’ve only made a couple. So but I’m hearing from other people, too, that they’re seeing that their direct traffic is increasing quite a bit when they make a story. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So the idea is right at the end that you don’t add a link to your pin to send them to your website, which is what we’re used to. You ask them to follow you. So then what are they do they go to your profile and then there’s a link in your profile to your website.
So that looks like maybe that is registering as direct traffic. Don’t know. Another thing is that you are attracting an engaged follower. Right? If they’re engaging with your idea and then they follow you, they’re more likely to see your other content that does have links and engage with that as well. So there’s that kind of downstream impact as well as just a follower count growth. So if if you’re an influencer, say, then maybe that’s something that really, really matters to you.
And Pinterest is saying more that that is going to matter. And in fact, when we’ve looked at accounts that are performing above average, they tend to have a much higher follower count, too. So I would say concentrate. You do idea Pinners, but also do Sediq Pinners and video Pinners as well. So I don’t see those going away. Right. Pinterest wants more idea and I think that’s where you’re going to get your biggest impact. We know, for instance, that they they get forty one times more saves than a static Pinners.
Wow. Yeah, that’s a lot. So let’s talk about this tailend moving into helping the story Pinners or is that something that you just kind of testing it?
It is not something that’s available yet for us to do. We’re definitely interested in hearing from people, if that’s something I want. So when you create a story pen, it’s creating an image Pinners pretty easy like we have tailend create where you can go in and drop in your URL. It will pull images out, you’ll pull the title out and you can just make a pen in less than two minutes, literally, because we’ve looked at how long people are spending making them.
But with an idea pen, if you’re not already in that habit, like, I think they’re really not very high lift for people like food bloggers who are used to taking video of each step or taking pictures of each step and writing out what to do like that. It’s a pretty easy transition to creating an idea pen. But for people like you and me, if we’re blogging about something and I decided my first idea for talent would be how to create an idea pen, but then you have to kind of go through, like outlining what you want to say, kind of storyboarding it and then creating that images or videos.
And it takes a while. So I think I’d love to know if people knowing that like how many video pens or idea Pinners are you going to be creating? Do this scheduling going to be still important to you? I think that will be important to to get that kind of feedback.
So rather than having everybody freak out about this, we’ll go back to stories like that. So let’s talk about first optimizing a profile. How do you recommend people start paying attention to the different factors of their profiles?
So I would, you know, add in keywords, just basic stuff. It doesn’t have to be complicated. People don’t spend a lot of time browsing your profile. I think that could change with idea of Pinners. But typically what they’re doing is they’re finding your content in search. So, yeah, the more important part is your board creation because Pinterest is so reliant on SEO Brame you want to make sure that your board names and your board descriptions have the right keywords in them and that what you’re what you’re saving to those boards matches because Pinterest looks for those signals.
Right? They look at a lot of different signals, but that’s one of them. Where did you save T? What’s the board name? What’s the board description? What else is on there? The pin that you’re you’re saving, does that match the key words on the page that it goes to if they want? That can. And see, for a better user experience so we can give them better signals that way, just as a side question, hashtags, good idea or bad idea, no longer recommended.
I know they’re in there. Out there and they’re out.
So, all right. Let’s say that I am I’m sold. I know Pinterest is going to be really good for me because I don’t want to go on YouTube and I don’t want to go on Google. I know that Pinterest is a search engine that’s going to help me. How do I start creating content that is actually going to drive traffic for me?
OK, well, it the foundation of it is your website content. So whether it’s a product listing or probably in this group, it’s more blog post, I would guess. Yeah. So think about what is the promise of that blog post. It’s very basic marketing 101, like what’s in it for me, what’s in it for them, what’s in it for a Pinners? And the cool thing about Pinterest is that ninety seven percent of the searches there are not branded.
So people are really open to new ideas and new creators and new things. So you have a great opportunity there. If you can show them how your idea, your product, your service fits in with somebody’s idea of an ideal life because that’s what we want. When we go on Pinterest, it’s like, how do I make my garden better? How to make my clothes better, how to make my hair better. All that stuff is about excuse me, is about me or about you, like what we want and usually for the future.
Is that so I want to create a Pinners for this blog post. Do I just create one or do I create multiple.
So I would suggest making a couple to test the creative right. So you might try one with a certain kind of image and a certain kind of text, always making sure it’s legible, even on mobile, and then make another one that’s different. But you don’t really have to stop there. If you think about, OK, think about this idea and who this might be important to or what are they thinking about that would make this important to them, or what event or what season or what trend is going on that would make this appealing to somebody and then lead into that.
And that way you’re getting new keywords, you’re attracting a different audience, you’re showing up in different searches, and you’re not ending up with two dozen Pinners for the same article that looked the same. And it’s not a great user experience.
What are the titles and descriptions of Pinners? How in depth do you think people should get with those?
So those are real important, right? So the title is pretty much the only thing you see in the feet aside from the image itself. And if the image itself has no text on it, it becomes even more important for us as bloggers. We usually want text on the image itself. That’s the most prominent thing what people are going to see first. Your title should not duplicate what you have on your image because this is additional real estate and you’re just really wasting it if it’s the same thing.
So find another way to frame what you’re saying and make it more motivational like you never want to say. Click here because that’s just spammy. Just imagine a feed with every Pinners here, right? It’s just awful. But you can make it a little bit more call to action, like find your find your best daily planner here, something like that and description. The description doesn’t even always show on Pinterest. Sometimes they’re sometimes not. But it is there in the background working for you if you use keywords.
Right. We’re not talking about like keyword type keyword, not keyword stuffing. We’re talking about writing one or two sentences. That’s all you really need and including your keywords there.
So now that I’ve got these things up, do I push them all at the same time or should I schedule them in intervals you definitely want to be consistently panning as opposed to dumping. Yeah, because Pinterest does like to see consistency of creators. Yeah.
And then what about going on the app to engage. Like is that really important or is it sort of like focus on your content and then you can go on when you’re waiting for the bus or something?
You know, one of the things I loved so much about Pinterest so is that you just put content there and you go, right. You don’t have to talk to anybody. I mean, I love people, but there’s a limit, right? I mean, the whole thing is the whole thing. So with video Pinners and static Pinners, you pretty much send them out there and let them do their thing with idea Pinners. On the other hand, you’re going to find out getting a lot more engagement.
So I’m getting comments on mine. I even. Photos online. So those you do want to respond to, Pinners is looking at that engagement that you’re getting on that pen.
Yeah, and what about, like pinning other people’s contact? How important is that?
Yes, the age old question. Right. And how much? 80, 20, 20, 80. So those rules are made to just make our lives easier, but it truly does not really help you directly. Right. So it’s your own content. And Pinterest has really made that clear, especially in the way they’ve redesigned analytics, the way they’ve redesigned our profile so that the content we’re creating from our own claimed websites is front and center. When we go to our analytics by default, it’s only showing the results from our own content.
If you look at monthly viewers, you’re you’re only seeing the impact of your own content, right. If other people share it, that that pulls in TubeBuddy. It really is about your own content. That’s where you want to focus. That said, people do naturally share other people’s content on Pinterest, whether they want to support somebody that they that they know, like and trust or whether they want to, like, genuinely save it to read later, like a normal Pinners.
Right. So that’s normal behavior for sure. And I think if if everyone. Well, I know if everyone stop doing that, then that would mean no Pinners we’re getting engagement. Right. And like Pinterest would be like, are these Pinners any good? So there’s nothing wrong with sharing other people’s content in moderation. But definitely you want to concentrate on your own. Something we’ve noticed, too, is that continuing to share the same image has quickly diminishing returns.
Right. So that first time your pin goes out as much more impactful than any other time it goes out. And in fact, saving like creating a new pin with tail and create and setting that out is around four hundred percent gives you about four hundred percent more shares on that pin. So yeah. So if at one point eight minutes for that kind of increase, definitely worth it.
So you mentioned briefly video Pinners we talk about what is the trend going with those? What do you what do you guys see going forward? Is are they essential or are static Pinners always going to be the best way to.
Well, video Pinners do get nine times the saves that static Pinners get. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I think they’ll always will be. Static Pinners and video Pinners. But Pinterest is real clear about what they want. They want and.
And those are just going to blow away the metrics on any other pan, but again, they don’t lead to that in themselves, have a link, which is the challenge. And Pinners knows that that’s a challenge like that. That’s a lot of work for us to be creating content for their platform. So they are looking at ways to allow people to monetize. So what that looks like, not 100 percent clear, although there have been people have spotted like sponsored idea Pinners and you can tag people in your idea Pinners.
So, for instance, the first one I ever made was of my painting. So it was showing the process sped up. And then some other videos along with like a list of materials. Now, I wasn’t able to tag it for some reason, but if I had been able to, I could have tagged the paint. The people who make the paint right, the people who make the canvas. And maybe if that really blew up, they would notice and be like, oh, we should at least send her some paint or maybe pay her to make another idea for us, like influencer deals could happen.
Just not really clear on how they’re going to monetize, but they know that they want to. So if you can get good idea Pinners now, that would probably be in your best interest.
I love that. And I love the idea of creating that sort of becklin. Instagram was still kind of the Wild West and we’re starting to think about the strategies. And this is seems like that’s what I’d Pinners is going to be.
Yeah, I think I think they really were the Wild West until about mid March when they they introduced an engagement distribution algorithm. Right. So so now how far your idea PIN goes is dependent on things like whether people react to it or comment or at a photo or whether they advance through frames or whether they click to open it, like all those things are going to go into getting more distribution. But because they’re a little more involved to make, there’s a lot less competition because Pinterest really wants them to take off.
They’re getting a lot more distribution. So this really is a good time to start making them.
So if I’m starting with or I’m getting static Pinners out to this blog post and then I’m going to do a little supplemental idea post series for this blog post. But I also want to create a video post for two because I don’t know, I’m using it on YouTube shorts too, or something. What kind of tips do you have for people who are creating video Pinners for the feed?
Yeah, so we analyzed so maybe back in January Pinners that had more than five thousand shares on them. And we wanted to see like, what are these super engaging fans and what are the pens that are getting a lot of distribution? A lot of them, about 30 percent of the ones that I looked at are video pens. And out of those, many, many of them are Tik Tok videos, which I thought was interesting. Now, Pinterest has since said they don’t don’t do that like create specially for this platform, much like Instagram did.
They don’t want to be giving another platform free advertising. I was still seeing them on there. But you can always use the raw video for it. But the point is, that’s the kind of content people want and specifically the do it yourself step by step educational process or what we’re doing. Well, so it wasn’t just like a a flying arrow. Right. Or just that it was something where the video actually added value to the post.
OK, so can you said that they’re getting pissed off about Tik Tok and things. Can you repurpose YouTube videos for something like that or I guess I mean like the format, does it have to be the critical Pinners way or can videos be the horizontal landscape too?
And they’re going to do a lot better if they’re square. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. So you can technically you can even pin a YouTube video, but those especially look really subquestion small.
Yeah. But if you’re uploading it through tailend or through Pinterest directly, you should be looking for a square format.
Yeah. Or or the or the vertical like you said. But Square can work and it’s usually a lot of times the easiest one to repurpose unless you’re doing the Tik Tok or the reels like those. Those can be great.
It’s interesting, I didn’t think about Square before, so let’s say I’m doing well. Pinterest is rocking for me. I’m ready to start thinking about boosting my post and starting an astrology recommend. People start thinking about that well.
Think about your willingness to commit. The reason I say that is because remember we talked about how ninety seven percent of searches are unbranded on Pinners, which means that when it comes to the funnel, they are way up here. Right. So if you’re advertising on Facebook, you might be talking to people who are more like here. So whatever time it usually takes you to know if a Facebook ad is working, give it twice as long on Pinterest. That’s a smaller audience.
It’s you know, it’s it’s a younger platform. So it’s not going to be as instant as as Facebook and people’s behavior is just different. So, yeah.
Well, let’s talk about the behavior of it. So is it a good strategy to take people to and for strategy? A good thing to take people to a blog post or a landing page? How does Pinterest usually create a successful conversion for people?
Yeah, I think it depends, of course, on maybe you have an amazing landing page, but generally speaking, you’re probably going to do better sending people to a blog post and then getting them on your email lists, warming them up that way, because so if you look at your Google Analytics, want to look at your traffic that comes from Pinterest. Look at the first time visitor. Usually that’s it’s a pretty high number. So they don’t really know you yet.
Typically, some of the ways that you can kind of improve that is when you’re writing your PIN descriptions include your brand name and your PIN description. So that can help build awareness and kind of warm up that fun a little bit. Also use branding on every pen. So whether that’s a subtle logo or subtle URL, put that right on your image. That is that kind of builds that trust and warm people up before they even get to your website.
So you cover that. And I know that astrology is way, way detailed and evl. So I will leave people to contact you for specific details about that. But I want to talk about moving on to figuring out how to automate the strategy with something like Tailend. And before we get to that, I want to talk about Tailend Tribes’, which has been so huge for me and so cute. Yeah. Like it’s a huge differentiator between actually getting people to pay attention.
But now that you’re mentioning that people Pinterest is paying more and more attention to your own content than your community, I guess, how do you see that affecting Tailwind tribes? And actually, can you talk about what scale and tribes are first?
Yeah, actually, we rename them telling communities. Yeah, that’s OK. But it is a place inside of Tailwind where like minded content creators will put in their best content and if they see something they want to share out, they share that out. The best communities are made up of people who know each other. So I have one that I started and everyone who came in like I vetted them, make sure their content was good, made sure their content would fit with the theme of the of the community.
And it just helps people, one, get more eyeballs on their content and get more shares on Pinterest. But it also surprising to me was a great way to discover people in MySpace that I didn’t know before. So if you want to do a content collaboration, that might be the first place you go because it’s like, you know, they’re content, you know, it’s good. I feel like with fewer people sharing, is that potentially as a group detrimental to everyone?
Yeah, probably, yeah. So I mean, if we’re just thinking about it in terms of direct impact, yes. Your own content is the most important. But Pinterest is kind of built on that collecting and sharing behavior and communities just kind of facilitated that really nice way.
So how do I start looking at some, like, tailwind? What is what goals should I have for subscribing to a service like that?
Um, it really is about the value of automation. So the strategy we’re using right now for ourselves is why don’t you blog post comes out? There are going to be several images already created for it. So we’re going to send out one today. We’re going to send out one in a couple of weeks, one a few weeks after that. And then because we found out that the half life of a pen. Right. Or kind of that peak of of Resharing happens at about two months out.
We’re going to probably. Create a couple more pins that kind of go on a different angle and try to reach a different audience, so it’s kind of give that content a sustained life on Pinterest. And, of course, like that two months is is very general. Right. So you probably still have some Pinners from years and years ago that people are still resharing. You’re getting a lot of traffic from it. But that was just kind of the median half life.
So we decided, well, let’s try that and see how it works. It seems to be going well in a lot of Facebook groups. People are saying why traffic is down and is it even worth it anymore? And that’s not what we’re experiencing. So automation makes it really easy. And then we do use hail and create to make some of our Pinners. If you create a product, you probably ought to use it. Right. So even though we have these really great designers on our team, I started using tail and create to make images and they performed outstandingly well, better than the professionally designed ones, which was a really awkward thing to have to admit.
You guys are awesome. This is not nothing personal, but and I think it is because they look different from our usual. Right. So you start to get to know a brand and maybe you think you’ve seen one. You’ve seen them all, but they just they just seem to work really well.
Can you talk about what SEO and create is?
Yeah. So it is a content creation tool inside of Tailwind and it actually works for Instagram feed post, Instagram story post, Pinterest Pinners and Facebook images. And what you do the entering your you URL part is, is optional, but it’s great for Pinterest because it does pull in every image of an appropriate size. From your blog post pulls in the title from your page, you can also upload images or choose from stock photos. And then when you hit the little magic button to create images or posts, you’re going to see hundreds and hundreds of already created designs pop up.
And then you can do things like swap out the photo with just a little click swap, like SEO up through the colors because you already set up your branding, right? So you have your brand colors in there, your logo in there, your fonts in there, which you can upload to. And then you have all four of those images ready to go. So Instagram post feed, Pinterest PIN and Facebook already done so you don’t have to rearrange everything if you don’t want to, they’re made to be perfect for that network from the get go.
It’s really quite fun.
I love that. And I did a whole tutorial video on how to do that. So I have a lot of fun playing with pretty good. Yeah, it was really fun. So I’m inside side of telling them giving this a shot. I have no idea what I’m doing. How do you recognize. So how do you recommend I get started entail. And once I decide like OK, I need help, I mean I would just start with tail and start making some pins and then when you hit the schedule button, they’ll show up where you can start to enter into your title and your description and just let them go to your schedule.
So when you start, it will generate a schedule for you. And what we’ve done is we’ve analyze gazillions of pins and figured out the best time for you to process kind of based on your industry, your followers, when they’re likely to be on and engaged. So you can kind of skip that part and just let them go into your into your queue and let them go.
So what about I know you guys have a or a single feature, so. Yeah. How do you recommend people use that.
Yeah. So smart loop is something that many people are still having great success with because Pinterest really wants that fresh content we have kind of it’s not something you can sign up for anymore. So if you have it and you’ll love it, fine. But it’s something that we’ve kind of put on the back burner because Pinterest really wants that fresh content. And generally speaking, that’s what’s going to give you better results.
So if we’re going back to then just going into the scheduler, say that I have created five posts for my one blog post and how do I start feeling or feeling out the schedule for those multiple Pinners for the same reasons that, as I said, it’s about two month, half life. How do I start thinking about that?
So if you want to kind of look at. All right, what kind of creative is working where you want to post them a little bit closer together because seasonal things would mess you up. So what we do and this is not like a sanctions strategy from Pinterest or anything, like we just try to figure it out like everybody else. So it will be like the first one out today, the next one out and maybe a week or two. Right.
And then those additional ones that we made to kind of just keep it going. Those will go out after two months and then two months after that. So when you’re in tail and you’ll be able to either just send them to your smart schedule and let us figure out when they go. But in that case, they’d probably all go out on the same day, which you don’t want, or you can set like when you want it, like exactly when you want it to go.
And what about the communities toggle button? So should I add that to my communities immediately or should I try and plan that out too?
Oh, here’s the cool thing. So because Pinterest really wants to give credit to the content creator as opposed to other people sharing your pen, your pen will not be available for scheduling and communities until it’s on Pinterest. So you can say like add communities today, it won’t actually show up until you send it out, because we need we need you to get the credit for the still cool. Yeah. Now, how do I start tracking if something’s being successful?
So we have a couple of tools inside of Tail-End that that are helpful out. Pinterest analytics are fantastic. They also can be overwhelming to some people. So we have something in and call the top Pinners report and that’s going to show you like where your traffic is coming from. So which pins are getting clicks on them? It’s also going to show you the engagement. Right. So that’s where I would start, is they’re looking at where where are you getting where you’re getting engagement.
You can also look at and it just completely went blank on what it’s called. Oh, pin specter. Right. To see how many repairs you’re getting on that, if you like that way better. But I like I just really like the the top Pinners report. There’s an option Tik Tok Pinners report to look at just stuff from your your domain. Right. And you’ll see the impact that other people are having on your content and your traffic when you look at that, because a lot of times the top performing one isn’t one that you say to somebody else, which like thank you, you can also switch over to everything you’ve penned.
So if you’re sharing other people’s content and I personally, I think this. Another reason to do that, you can see what’s getting clipped there, too. So if you see something that’s really strikingly successful, you can think to yourself, all right, why is it the design style? Is it the text on the image? Is it the content topic itself? And if so, if it makes sense for you, should you do something kind of like that to see if you can also have similar success?
Are there any kind of benchmarks that you can think of as like this is probably a good success rate or this is something that you really need to rethink the strategy?
No, unfortunately not, because it completely depends. Right on your industry. So, yeah, just just compete with yourself.
So when do I decide that I need to focus more on Pinterest and less on Instagram clubhouse, whatever? Like when do I start really thinking about this is the place that is for me that makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah, totally. I think I think some of it is going to come from what you like and what you love. Right. So if if creating for Pinterest brings you joy to probably do some more of that. Right. Because you’ll be more consistent and more of you will come through in it. Of course you’re gonna want to look at results, too. And I think Pinterest and Instagram work really well together where Pinterest you just get discovered and Instagram helps you to kind of build a relationship.
Now, with Pinterest changing, that’s probably a change to you on Pinterest. You’ll have an opportunity to get how people get to know you. But typically, yeah, that’s that’s how it’s work. So if you can do both, that’s great on Pinterest, give it some time. So if you try it for a month and you’re like going anywhere, that’s not long enough. So again, it’s it’s a commitment thing on Instagram. Your first day there, your first post you’re going to see you’re going to see some results and it’s going to feel really good on Pinterest.
It might feel like crickets for a little while. When I was working with management clients, it would be a six month contract because you can’t really expect to see that meaningful growth and activity until six months. But on the other hand, you’ll get results from what you’re doing now for many months and sometimes years to come, because even though typical half life two months, we still get traffic from some really ancient Pinners seriously ancient. And that’s what I love about Pinterest, too, is that with Instagram or whatever, you kind of scroll and it gets lost in the feed eventually.
But anyone can search for, I don’t know, blog tips and your pen can come up. So it’s not like you’re wasting content. I mean.
Absolutely, yep.
So let’s end with a fun little nerd facts. OK, what have you seen overall, like really successful things and what have you seen as people are constantly messing up?
I’m really successful things can I think video is surprisingly effective on Pinterest. People are actually searching and including the word video in their searches on Pinterest, which I don’t think I ever thought I would see. So. So try video if you can see it. It’s like not successful. I don’t want to say ugliness, because even though you do look pretty Pinners, sometimes the ugly ones actually work, which is weird. Let’s see, just kind of images.
I want things not to do. Like real beginner issue is linking all your Pinners to your home page or not linking them at all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that. It’s just very sad because because it’s such an opportunity.
Well, and Pinterest look kind of dorky for that, right?
Potentially, yeah. Because what they want to see is that consistency between the pin and the landing page itself. So if they don’t match, yeah. Pinterest is not going to distribute it.
So and I guess another bad one would just be just keeping the same branding the whole time.
That one I feel like as a matter of opinion. So I’ve had people, if you like, but I have to get my rating and it’s like, OK, well, what do you what do you want? Do you want awareness or do you want engagement? Like do you want the clicks. Do you want. Yeah. So it’s. You want awareness, keep your branding the same all the time, sure, but if you’re open to trying something new, you might find you get more traffic, you get more engagement, you get more distribution for your Pinners from a different look.
So it really I don’t think one is right or wrong. I know which one I want. I want traffic. So, yeah, I’ll try, I’ll try just about anything as long as it’s not totally hideous. Although some people are like my hideous fans are the best, but really it’s about standing out. So a good thing to do is to search your keyword. Just go ahead and search it on Pinterest and see what pops up, because a lot of times you’ll see an overwhelming, like, dominant color, like if you search dinner recipes is going to come up as this like mustard yellow, brown and everything.
And it just it’s a wall of that color. So then you can think I can stand out in this feed if I make something that’s bright blue. Right. So, yeah, even if bright blue isn’t your color, maybe you want to use it so you stand out.
So when do you recommend people start looking at your agency and what kind of work do you want them to do ahead of time before they come to you?
So I’m doing very little with my agency right now. Full disclosure, because Talon keeps me on my toes. If you wanted to work with a Pinterest ad manager, definitely you want to think about a couple of things like are you willing to make that commitment that may feel a little uncomfortable while you’re waiting for things to settle out? Think about what is the value of a click. Now, maybe you’ve done this with Facebook, maybe you have not. But you have to think about how many visits to a site do I need to generate a sale?
Right. And then what is that sale worth? And then looking at that conversion rate, then what is a click worth? Brame, you may find that it’s just wouldn’t be profitable for you or you may find it. Right. So figure that out very first thing. Figure out what your typical sales cycle is from first look to sale. Right. Because you’ll want that to figure out, well, double that. You’ll need to check it out on Pinterest.
Yeah, that would be my recommendation.
Now, what about Tailwind? When do you recommend people start using Tailend immediately?
I mean, I really have been a champion of talent since long before I joined the team because now it’s tailwinds not going to do anything for you. It’s not going to create idea for you at this point. There’s a lot of stuff that only you can do. Right. But what we are really good at is the stuff that you don’t need to be worrying about. Right. You don’t have to be worrying about if all those Pinners like those five pins are created for that blog post are now appropriately scheduled for the next six months, just get it back, get it done right.
And then creating that content, especially if you’re you’re already on Instagram, we’re already on Facebook. Maybe you’re thinking about adding Pinterest and create is the easiest way to do that, to get it all done and all out of Facebook. Scheduling is coming soon, but you can you can download that image anywhere.
Oh, I just thought of one Pinners, same pin, multiple boards. Is that a good idea about idea?
Well, you can do it, but like I said earlier, get very quickly diminishing returns on it. So only save it to relevant boards and may give it a little bit more context. And for Pinterest to work with like, oh, not only is this a blog post about SEO, it’s also a blog post about writing great titles. So it could be those two boards that gives a little more context. But that first time out is the most most important and you will get better results as far as distribution shares.
Well, if people have questions, how can they get in touch with you?
They can get in touch with me on Twitter or Instagram or see how else it’s at least Meridith if you want to reach out and either of those places or of course, at Talin, it’s at least that tail end up dotcom.
And have we missed anything that you want people to know about?
I just hope that I hope that there’s some excitement about the possibilities and especially where, I mean, things are changing. Yes. And those of us who’ve been on for a long time are probably struggling a bit with the changes. But if you haven’t been on it, this is like a whole new world. And you even though Pinners has been out for ten years or so, this is a whole new direction for them. So if you get in now and you learn to get really good at this, you could have just like an early adopters advantage, even though it’s been around a while because it’s changing.
The still optimistic good, good, so much I really appreciate it.
Absolutely. My pleasure.
