Hello food blog friends!!
It’s been a GREAT week in Pinterest land and I’m excited to help share a recent announcement the Pinterest Business Community made (it’s not often you’ll catch me saying that sentence! lol)
Like many of you, I have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest.
It has brought my blog a lot of success and I am forever grateful for that. But since they’ve shifted focus on expanding as an e-commerce platform (remember, Paypal explored the purchase of Pinterest in 2021), it’s been a battle to find new growth on Pinterest.
When Story Pins, or Idea Pins were launched 2 years ago, the biggest frustration for content creators was the fact that they were not linkable.
Understandably, Pinterest’s goal was to keep the user in the app or platform, and this was a very difficult reality to adapt for both users and content creators.
Creating Idea Pins were a lot more time consuming for creators, and for us food bloggers especially, it was tough to see any ROI if we were not getting traffic back to our blog.
Goodbye Idea Pins
On May 11th, Pinterest announced that the current format of Idea Pins would be retired, and Idea Pins would now behave as video pins (YAY!)
Possibly the best part of all, Idea Pins now include all features that are available to legacy static & video pins, such as links, scheduling, post-publish editing, etc.
This is a brilliant move in the favor of creators!! 🎉🎉🎉
For any existing Idea Pins you have, Pinterest has stated that the page/sections will be preserved and the pin itself will be converted to video. Any new Idea Pins (which are simply now video pins) will not have the pages function.
You can find the full announcement + FAQ from Pinterest here.
What To Do Today
If you already have Idea Pins that you’ve worked hard to publish, a suggestion would be to go back and add a link to the pin immediately.
Now that these pins are clickable, you have a great opportunity to drive some traffic back to your website.
This could be a big task depending on how many Idea Pins you’ve created, so I would suggest you start with your highest performers and work your way down. You want to ensure you are taking advantage of any pin content that is currently trending.
How to Edit Old Idea Pins
You can do this by clicking into the pin, clicking ‘edit’ and adding in the URL & description.
Be sure to add targeted keywords and long tail keywords to your description!
Other Tips
If you’re like me and lost touch with Pinterest a while ago, I’ve recently discovered some interesting newer features that could be rather valuable.
This may be old news to some so apologies for any redundancy, but I thought these would be worth speaking to since they are super useful.
The highlighted area below appears to be new - I have not tested out including these keywords in my pins but it’s great to see we have quick access to relevant insights without having to dig into the Analytics tab or look at Pinterest trends reports.
It may be useful to review these and include them in your pin descriptions as you go through and update your Idea Pins to see if it has a positive impact.
One thing I did notice is, if you refresh your browser page these keywords also refresh.
Here are some new keywords that popped up when I refreshed the page (same pin):
This pin was about decorated cookies so it’s interesting that Pinterest is suggesting raspberry desserts and summer cupcakes in the refreshed page, so these keyword prompts are not exactly isolated to the subtopic of the pin you’ve selected (perhaps that will change in the future!)
Other keyword functions you can use are using the suggestions in the search bar..
…or by using the suggestion bubbles.
This was a function that had been removed a while back, but was luckily revived! It’s super helpful when searching which keywords to include in your pin descriptions.
I do have a 3rd method for finding niche keywords that is worth creating a tutorial for, so I’ll add that to the list for future topics! 😉
Master Your Mindset
Over the last few years as we know, Pinterest has been working on reinventing itself to be somewhere in between an ecommerce site and social media. I think for certain niches this is a beneficial shift, but when it comes down to getting traffic to your food blog, Pinterest has become a sour topic.
Many food bloggers including myself, have nearly abandoned or abandoned creating new content for Pinterest. It’s hard to find value in spending time creating pins when there is little return.
I’d love to hear if any of you are conducting some tests to see if there’s improved conversion - it’s something I plan on doing for sure!
Overall, is Pinterest trying to win back the hearts of food blog / recipe creators? I’d like to be optimistic and see Pinterest become a reliable traffic source once again.
I guess we’ll see!
