This is huge, guys! Pinterest finally came up with some very important information that will help us keep our accounts safe and within Pinterest Spam Policies. We’ve been waiting for years to get a little bit of clarity about the limits of pinning on Pinterest. And I’m happy to see that Pinterest started giving us some idea of what can get us caught into spam filters!
In today’s post, you will learn what is changing in Pinterest’s best practices this year. How you need to adjust your strategy to get the best results from your efforts on this platform. You’ll also learn how some of the new features introduced by Tailwind Scheduler and developed in collaboration with Pinterest, can help you stay within the recommended pinning limits and avoid getting your account suspended on Pinterest.
The Best Practices For Pinterest Marketing 2023
Both Tailwind and Pinterest made an hour-long live session where they shared the best practices for Pinterest marketing for this year. But I will do my best to give you a short version with the most essential information so you don’t get your account suspended.
Before I tell you the pinning limits, I need you to understand something. Pinterest can not publish any specific numbers or limits on their official pages because it would be equal to giving an exact recipe to people who want to abuse the system.
So what Pinterest is doing instead, they are giving the good folks who want to follow the rules, a little bit of guidance through their authorized partner. Technically, Tailwind scheduler will now show us certain pinning limits and alert us if we are going overboard saving the same pin too many times or saving too many pins a day. The new Tailwind features are called SmartGuide and Spam Safeguard.
Here are the questions that people asked me here on Youtube and in my course about 3075 times so far. And I always had to answer based on my experience and on the little pieces of information we could catch here and there from a few interviews Pinterest representatives gave in the last two years.
But now we know that Tailwind mentioned specific numbers on their page about Pinterest best practices. You can visit the page here. Now on to the questions:
How many times a day should I pin on Pinterest?
Tailwind’s going to enforce that we can save no more than 50 pins a day using their scheduler.
However, 50 seems to be the very top limit and the recommended pinning volume is between 15 and 25 pins a day. Tailwind claims that “If you Pin far more than this, you’re exposing your account to unnecessary risk and hurting the distribution of your content on Pinterest. This leads to less engagement for your Pins and less traffic to your website!”
How many times can I repin the same pin to different boards?
Tailwind will enforce a maximum of 10 boards in the board list you are choosing to save any given pin. If you decide to save your pin to more than 10 boards, you will see an alert like this one from the SmartGuide feature.
What is the recommended interval between the pins when I save them to a list of boards?
Previously, on Tailwind the minimum interval of pinning to different boards was only 10 minutes. A lot of people abused this and used to save the same pin to multiple boards on the same day. If you follow me for a while now, you know I was always telling you guys to be very careful with this. It is called repetitive pinning and can get your account suspended.
Well, now if you use Tailwind, the new minimum interval is 2 days.
Yep, that’s right. You should not even save the pin once a day—once every two days is what Pinterest recommends this year.
By the way, check out my other post if you need help coming up with great Pinterest board ideas relevant to your content.
How many new pin images should I create per page? Isn’t it considered spammy if I create 5 different images for one page on my site?
No, it’s not spammy at all, it’s actually what Pinterest wants from us. Obviously, it doesn’t mean you should save all 5 different pins in one day because they will be linked to the same page. It only means that Pinterest prefers that the percentage of new images, fresh pins on your account is higher than the number of duplicate pins.
By the way, the definition of a duplicate pin has evolved. Previously, Pinterest and Tailwind said that duplicates where the “Pins with an exact image/URL combination saved to a specific board more than once”.
Now, if you check Tailwind’s Help Center article about duplicate pins, they removed the part about the pins being saved to the same board. It doesn’t matter anymore if you saved this pin to another board or to the same board. What matters only is that this exact combination of the image and page URL has already been Pinned to Pinterest before. Moreover, they added in parenthesis, that it can be saved by you or anyone else! This means if you repin something saved by other users from your site, with the same image and URL combination, you are also creating duplicate pins.
What are “Duplicate” Pins?
Duplicate Pins are Pins with an exact image/URL combination that has already been Pinned to Pinterest before (by you or anyone else).
The good news is if you are following me for a while now, you know I’ve been talking about it for over a year. Pinterest wants fresh content, and rewards accounts that are able to consistently produce fresh pins for the platform.
You could ask me, “Why Pinterest is so obsessed with fresh pins?” Well, because historically, about 80% of all the content on the Pinterest platform were just repins and not original images. There is only one research I can quote on this number, and Pinterest never shared their official reports.
It says that 80% of Pinterest are repins and only 20% are new images saved to the platform.
And I am sure even nowadays Pinterest platform consists mostly of repins. Just think about it. Some of the most popular viral pins on the platform can get 10, 20 thousand repins or even more. So, each of those viral pins is a source of thousands and thousands of repins. Obviously, it is a real struggle for Pinterest to keep the share of “fresh” content on the platform higher.
What became even more obvious to me after this live session with Pinterest and Tailwind, is that Pinterest is already twisting their algorithm in order to surface more fresh content on the platform. And in the future, this trend will only get stronger. So what’s the conclusion for us, content creators? Well, the conclusion is we have to find our way to create multiple unique pin images for each page on our website, to maximize the distribution of our pins on Pinterest.
You can watch this video where I’m showing how you can create 5 different versions of a pin in Canva, really quickly within about 10 minutes:
How different should be those pin versions from one another to be considered “fresh” pins?
I hope Tailwind doesn’t mind if I show again an example from their best practices page. I believe they have reviewed this example with the Pinterest team and this should demonstrate some of the elements of an image you could consider changing to create Fresh Pins:
- First, you can use Different background photos (including slightly different angles)
- Second, you can create Meaningfully different crops of the same image, which provides a new view or perspective. So you can focus on a specific object in a photo vs. showing that object in a wider scene.
I want you to pay attention to the fact that just by changing the text overlay on your image, you are not following the best practices. Remember that Pinterest is a visual search engine. And they have mechanisms that allow the platform to recognize when the same exact image is used over and over again, with a slightly different text overlay.
If you want to really follow the guidelines, you should strive to offer a substantially different experience or perspective for Pinterest users with those fresh pins!
If you are using Tailwind and can’t see these new features on your account yet, don’t worry, Tailwind is rolling them out on all accounts until the end of Feb 2021.
Here is what Tailwind says about SmartGuide feature:
Initially, SmartGuide will:
- Monitor your Pinning and alert you if your current Pinning frequency could reduce your overall reach or put your account at unnecessary risk
- Suggest easy fixes to maintain a healthy queue of scheduled Pins
And when I am looking at my account now, I can see the SmartGuide feature that tells me:
Over time, SmartGuide will:
- Keep you up-to-date with the latest best practices on Pinterest (we’ll continue working closely with them as Partners!)
- Provide easy, actionable recommendations on how to improve your strategy, maintain healthy Pinning habits and make the most out of your Pinterest activity.
I’m sure guys you might have a ton of other questions to ask, and I encourage you to do so in the comments below this post.
These were the fundamental questions and answers you needed to know about Pinterest best practices moving forward.
And of course, if you want to always stay updated when changes this happen, I invite you to join my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets program. There you get access to me in my private student-only Facebook group. I am answering all the questions daily in that group. Yes, every single day, so you will never feel alone or lost while you are building your presence on Pinterest.
If you found this post useful, you might want to save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board to check the post later when new updates are announced.
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.
Comments 1
Thanks for this, it’s honestly very helpful! 🙂