If content marketing plays a crucial role in your current online marketing strategy, understanding how to better optimize your content for Pinterest should be toward the top of the list when it comes to your preferred social media channels. Often overlooked by companies who are trying to position themselves on more popular channels like Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest is still quietly gliding along delivering high volume and high intent traffic to savvy content marketers.
With higher market saturation in the United States than both Twitter and Snapchat, Pinterest offers significant potential as a discovery channel. As site owners have continued to see a steady decline in referral traffic from Facebook, Pinterest has spent the past few years steadily climbing as a referrer and is responsible, on average, for roughly 8% of referral traffic across the web. While Pinterest is technically considered a social media channel, most users tend to view it less as a place for peer to peer interaction and more as a place for discovery. Users view Pinterest as a place to search for or stumble across ideas and products that can easily be sorted into a curated collection of resources to that can be called upon when they are ready to engage more fully. 98% of Pinterest users report having tried something they found on Pinterest and 84% claim they use it to help them decide what to buy. Pair those figures with the idea that 97% of the most popular searches on Pinterest are non-branded and you have got an incredible opportunity to get your products, services, and content in front of a highly engaged audience with demonstrated intent. Pinterest Runs on an Algorithm With more than 175 billion items pinned onto 3 billion pinboards, Pinterest has no shortage of content to offer users. To that end, Pinterest has come to rely on several layers of algorithms to help decide what content to users wish to see. There are three primary areas where the Pinterest algorithm comes into play: The Pinterest Smart Feed: This is the content shown to a user when they log in to their Pinterest account. The Following Feed: This tab includes a more chronologically driven set of pins pulled from the accounts and boards a user has followed. Pinterest Searches: These are the results that appear when a user runs a search for a keyword or keyword phrase. While there are best practices and SEO related guidelines to helping your content rank well in Pinterest, there are also some nuances to the individual displays that are important to keep in mind when working to optimize your Pinterest presence. The Pinterest Smart Feed As the default interface, the Pinterest Smart Feed represents important real estate. Pinterest knows that users on a mission will likely switch gears to run a search if they come to the channel with intent, but they also know many view Pinterest as a destination in and of itself. With the latter group in mind, Smart Feed aims to offer up a relevant mix of pins designed to catch a user’s eye and hopefully drive engagement. The Smart Feed pulls content from three locations: accounts and boards followed by the user, targeted advertisements sponsored through the Pinterest system and individual pins a user might not normally see, but that Pinterest feels will appeal to the user at the time they logged in. Pinterest uses a combination of factors like account authority, domain quality, pin quality, and recent Pinterest activity to sort and prioritize content from each of these three sources. Pinterest serves up a collection of pins from each of these three funnels to a user and adjusts what they see moving forward based on how they engage with the content appearing in their feed. Recent activity on Pinterest (i.e., searches, repins, click-thru activity, etc…) factor in VERY heavily in the Smart Feed display. Users can see an almost instant shift in pin focus as they engage with the content, with Pinterest quickly prioritizing the content topic with which a user is currently engaging. The Pinterest Following Feed A fairly recent addition to Pinterest, the Following Feed is Pinterest’s attempt to give users a current reflection of the content their chosen connections are interacting with on the site. While there is an algorithmic influence in this feed; this is the discovery area most focused on delivering recent content from accounts a user has already chosen to follow.
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