It has been years since Pinterest has been so forthcoming about what they expect us pinners to do when it comes to best practices and to keep within their guidelines so that we can massively grow our Pinterest following and traffic.
So let me give you the big news from Pinterest about the best practice for 2020.
Table of Contents
1. Pinning to New Pages on Your Site Best Practice
Now let’s make one thing very clear. More than anything, Pinterest loves images that are new and they especially love new images that are to new content! This is the very best combination.
So. To get the very best results with Pinterest, creating brand new content on your website/blog regularly is what you should be aiming to do.
Pinterest is based around the idea of new images being posted and so it stands to reason that new images linking to new content are the best combo.
When you have posted new content onto your site, it is a good idea to create 5 pins for this page.
Different people respond differently to images so you really want a variety of design styles (and it is incredibly easy in Canva as I show you in a video below, to create these images.
See the video ‘How to Make 5 Pinterest Images in 5 minutes without Design Skills below’).
S0 if you have written a new page, blog post or product page on your site, then create 5 Pinterest images for that one new piece of content.
Then manually add each to one of your boards and then use Tailwind to Schedule the pins onto other boards you want to add them to.
By using Tailwind, you can:
- schedule the pins (so you do not have to do them all manually, which is time-consuming)
- make sure that the pins are spread out so that your Pinterest board feed doesn’t show the same pin 5 timers in a row.
- use Tailwind’s new Spam Safeguard tool (I explain this below) to make sure that you are pinning within Pinterest guidelines.
2. Pinning to Old Pages (Pages You Have Pinned to Before)
You should now post a new image only to 1 board and that board should be to the most appropriate board possible.
To clarify, I recommend these days NOT to post the same image to the same board more than once.
In fact, given the recent Pinterest algorithm changes, I recommend not even posting an image to more than one board. So make one image and share it just on one board once.
Pinterest is a platform that thrives on getting new images. It is the foundation of what Pinterest is about.
Pinterest wants to avoid having people overly share the same images time and time again. They want new images.
So give Pinterest what they want and you will see your Pinterest traffic grow!
It is so easy to make new images on Canva so why not create fresh ones?
Even though Pinterest is all about new images and new content, you can find that old images you have to get you some great traffic to your blog or website but focusing on creating new images is a great strategy moving forward.
Do make sure also, if you are pinning to old content with new images, to also create some new content from time to time. Once a week ideally, if you really want to build your Pinterest following and visitors.
Do not only Pin to old content!
3. How Many Boards Can I Post a Pin to?
As a partner of Pinterest, Tailwind has set a limit of 10 boards on their safe scheduler limit.
You can pin to more boards than that but you are not recommended to if you want to make sure to stay within Pinterest spamming policies.
So certainly DO pin a new image to more than one board. Pin it to any relevant boards but no more than 10!
4. Maximum Number of Pins a Day
Many of you have asked me this one question many times and now that Pinterest themselves have given a clear answer to this, I can now pass this information directly onto you.
Pinterest does NOT want you to post more than 50 Pins a day. Tailwind though states that 15 – 25 pins are the recommended amount!
Those of you who are new to Pinterest will quite possibly still manually be pinning any pins you add onto Pinterest and thus I doubt that you are pinning 50 or more times a day on a regular basis.
If you are a more established Pinterest user, with a growing following, I suspect you are already using Tailwind (if not, let us know in the comments at the bottom what tool you use).
In Tailwind, I am sure you will appreciate how easy it is to build up a schedule of 20, 30 or more pins a day into your schedule. Just make sure you keep it to a maximum of 50.
By the way, for those of you wondering why I keep talking about Tailwind and who are wondering what on earth it is. Tailwind is the most popularly used tool for scheduling pins on Pinterest and it is a partner-approved tool by Pinterest themselves.
5. Repetitive Pinning
If you pin something to several boards, all within the case of a few minutes or even within the same hour, this is known as repetitive pinning.
You should avoid repetitive pinning at all costs when using Pinterest because this is a common reason why some Pinterest users end up seeing their account blocked or suspended.
The new minimum re-pin time now that Tailwind has set on their safeguard tool is 2 days!
In essence, Pinterest is a visual search engine so they want variety and new images as much as possible, and the more you can do this, the greater Pinterest will value your pins.
6. Using Tailwind Pinterest Spam Safeguard
The good news in Tailwind now is that they have a nifty little feature that instantly shows you if your pin’s schedule is safe or spammy.
As you can see in the image above, Tailwind has recently added in an “All Clear” button that sits just above your Schedule.
Just make sure to check this “All Clear” button every now and then to ensure that there are no warning messages.
If there are, then you will need to mix up your pins more and possibly need to add more pins to spread out pins that are the same image and URL combo but that you are placing on several boards.
7. Pins Consistency (Remains Important)
The consistency of the image is important! The image and text on the pin should, for example, relate to the page you are linking to.
The image (or video) you are pinning must relate and the text on the image should certainly relate to the page you are linking to.
Summary
Let’s do a quick summary of all the points raised and list them as a bullet point list so that you can quickly reference these points in the future if you re-visit this post.
- Create 5 pins for every new piece of content you are linking to.
- If you want to pin to that same comment in the future (i.e. 6 months time) just create a new pin (it takes only a few minutes in Canva).
- Do not place the same pin on more than 10 boards.
- Keep an eye on the Tailwind Spam Safeguard button and warnings.
- Make sure your pins are related (image and text-wise) to the content you are pinning to.
- Ideally, try and pin between 15 and 25 times a day. If you do more, avoid pining more than 50 times a day.
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This is an excellent post to help us make sure we don’t end up in Pinterest jail! Luckily, since I have fewer blog posts I make a lot of new pins for each one and schedule them out for months on Pinterest. Thanks for the info!
Hi Heather. Yes, best to be careful with your {Pinning strategy to avoid#, as you call it, Pinterest jail 🙂