Do pinned posts get more views?

The social media tool Pinterest has long been a great medium for driving traffic to your website in addition to regular search engine clicks.

Fuelled by visual bookmarks, niches areas such as travel, home, lifestyle, design, recipes, décor and gardening have traditionally performed particularly well on Pinterest thanks to their inherent visual appeal.

Because, that used to be the only key thing you needed to do to gain traffic from Pinterest – simply create a visually appealing pin, link it to the relevant page on your website, and then post it across multiple boards.

But now the parameters of Pinterest have changed.

With this social media platform making several major updates in recent months, things have got a bit dynamic when it comes to ensuring Pinterest is still driving traffic to your website.

If you’ve noticed, in recent months, that your Pinterest traffic has dropped, it’s probably because you’re no longer using a strategy that takes into account the platform’s recent updates.

This means it’s time for you to update how you use Pinterest asap!

To learn more about what this involves, as well as how you can once again get those Pinterest clicks up, here’s my 9 tried and tested ways to get more views on Pinterest in 2021.

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#1 Pin Titles

Pin titles are a new element the platform has slowly been rolling out and you should definitely ensure that everything you pin has a keyword optimised title that clearly and succinctly denotes what the pin is about.

Short and punchy, Pinterest titles are up to 100 characters, with the first 30 characters appearing in most searches under the pin.

The full title is then shown in full when a user clicks on the pin for further details.

Because of this formatting, pin titles should be bold, simple and eye-catching, especially at the start.

However with text overlay advised on pins, titles are less likely to affect users decisions to click on your pins and are arguably more important for ensuring Pinterest categorises and displays your content correctly.

In other words, pin titles are critical for Pinterest SEO – ensuring you appear in relevant searches – and you’d be unwise to miss this key opportunity to get more impressions, saves and clicks.

If you’re creating multiple pins for the same piece of website content (which we strongly recommend) then experiment with titles and monitor which seem to be performing better.

#2 Pin Descriptions

And following on from titles, it’s also increasingly important in 2020 that your pins have descriptions added to them.

This is another place for you to add context to your pin and encourage users to click on it.

Pin descriptions also another place where you can enhance your Pinterest SEO strategy.

Research suggests Pinterest descriptions should be around 300 characters (although they can be up to 500 characters) and again should utilise keywords, as well as phrases and language, that connect your pin to the relevant website page.

Ensuring pins reflect the pages they link to is something Pinterest is becoming very hot on – another key way you can get more views from this platform in 2020.

If you’re wondering what keywords to include in both your pin titles and descriptions, then use Pinterest to help you!

Simply type relevant terms into the Pinterest search box at the top of the platform and you’ll get a dropdown list of commonly searched and related / expanded terms.

Choose one and hit enter and you’ll then get further suggestions in the coloured bubbles below the search box.

Be careful to avoid keyword stuffing, so choose 1 relevant longtail keyword from these options and focus on that.

Pinterest descriptions should also be detailed, specific and contextual.

Including your business name, a clear call to action and 2-4 hashtags is also advised.

#3 Hashtags

Which brings us on to point number 3 in this list of the best ways to optimise your Pinterest strategy for 2020.

We remember here at Social Puffin when Pinterest first came on the scene and we used it to drive huge traffic to our blogs.

Back then it was all about using hashtags, but before long this practise seemed to become ineffective, untidy and increasingly irrelevant.

We, like many others, dropped it.

But now hashtags on Pinterest are back!

A great keyword opportunity to get that SEO working well for you, hashtags provide another way Pinterest can help categorise and ultimately display your content to users searching the info you’ve got!

As such, they shouldn’t be overlooked!

But don’t go overboard.

We recommend the use of 2-4 hashtags at the end of the description of each pin.

Hashtags should consist of terms that people are likely to search on Pinterest.

#4 Grow Plugin

When it comes to adding titles, descriptions and hashtags to your Pins, this can, of course, be done manually, but it’s time confusing and pretty inefficient!

As such, here at Social Puffin, we are love Grow.

A WordPress plugin specifically driven to increase social shares on your content, the special focus Grow gives to Pinterest sets it apart in our opinion.

The free version has some basic features, but the very affordable paid subscription (it’s around $25 per annum) gives many added extras that will automate much of your new Pinterest strategy.

2020 just got a lot easier!

Allowing you to add and save titles, descriptions and hashtags to your Pin images, means they will be automatically filled when you (or even better, another user) saves your pin to Pinterest.

This way you can be sure your brand message is getting out there and your pins stand the best chance of being shown on the platform.

We also love Grow’s “hidden pins” feature, which allows you to create and upload even more Pinterest-optimised images for your content piece, without them having to be visible on the page itself!

Genius!

#5 New Pins

Which leads us on nicely to discussing the issue of new pins or fresh pins.

In 2020, Pinterest has explicitly-stated that fresh pins are crucial to performing well on the platform.

Quite simply, they don’t want to see the same pins being repeatedly pinned and peddled out.

Instead new images and pin designs are what Pinterest wants to see.

As such, it’s now more important than ever to create multiple pins for each piece of content and to pin these fresh to the platform at different times.

Canva is still where we recommend creating your pins and, in general, we suggest 4 pins for each piece of content.

Of these, we suggest displaying 2 within the relevant content in a “Pin This” section and then placing the 2 others into the “hidden pins” section with Grow.

#6 Tailwind

The next step is to then use Tailwind to organise the actual pinning of this content.

While we suggest pinning 1 of your fresh images live, we do wonder who really has the time to organise pinning the other 3 at regular, optimised intervals.

Not us!

And that’s where Tailwind comes in!

Our preferred scheduling tool, Tailwind really does the hard Pinterest work for you.

Extra features such as Tribes and SmartLoop can also increase your Pinterest results, but even their basic features, which allow you to schedule pins to be posted automatically to several different boards, is a godsend!

Tailwind can even help you ascertain the optimal times you should be pinning and, by using this service, you can also ensure each “repin” is read by Pinterest as a fresh pin.

Honestly, we can’t imagine Pinterest success without Tailwind.

You can learn more in this post we wrote all about Tailwind, or check out this top tool directly HERE.

#7 Relevant Boards

And now we’re onto the subject of the physical act of pinning, it’s time to talk about boards.

Whereas previously many Pinterest strategies seemed to involve pinning as much as possible, to many boards as possible, that’s certainly no longer the case in 2020.

Now it’s clear Pinterest prefers content pinned to carefully selected, relevant, niche-specific boards.

And not to too many boards either.

We recommend each pin be scheduled with Tailwind to no more than 10 boards.

If you belong to many boards, including group boards, this could the perfect opportunity for you to slim down and refine the number of boards you have on your Pinterest profile – ensuring all your content fits neatly into a few, well-chosen, niche specific boards.

And it goes without saying, that board titles and descriptions should be keyword-driven for Pinterest SEO purposes too!

#8 Interact Live

But with all this talk of SEO, it’s easy to forget Pinterest is also a social media and, as such, it also demands a social media approach too.

And this largely boils down to interacting and using the app live.

Yes, just like Instagram, Pinterest’s algorithm seems to reward on-app time and usage, so there’s no getting away from the fact that interacting live with the platform will help boost your own reach.

Ensuring the Pinterest app is on your phone is crucial to fitting live interaction into your day and, if you’re serious about growing your Pinterest views this year, ensuring you denote some time to this each day is key.

#9 Comment

And while interacting live in Pinterest by pinning and clicking on others’ content is paramount, so too is engagement.

And by that we mean commenting on others’ pins and replying to any users that comment on yours.

You can access the comments section of your Pinterest account directly by visiting www.pinterest.com/engagement.

Build commenting into your daily tasks too and use it wisely to also take notice of any Pinterest trends or platform success stories that catch your eye … then try these things with your content too!

So there they are, our 9 key ways to get more views on Pinterest in 2020.

We hope they provide useful and have inspired you to revitalise your strategy on this platform if, like many, you’ve seen your Pinterest views declining in recent times.

Because, with more people than ever using Pinterest thanks to lockdown restrictions around the world, there’s never been a better time to refresh approach to this platform!

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