How to Know Which Pinterest Group Boards Are Not Worth Your Time

As a new blogger, you probably get yourself into ANY Pinterest group boards that let you in. I did the same and when you have a new Pinterest account with 0 followers, you should be happy to get any invites to group boards at all. 

At a certain point though, you start wondering if it’s worth sending requests to some of the groups which have 300 Pinterest followers or 6000 contributors.

Is taking part in gigantic group boards with thousands of contributors good or bad for your Pinterest account’s reputation? Are tiny groups with less than 500 followers worth your time?

All these questions get into your head once you are on 20 group boards or more. Now you need to solve the next-level problem:

HOW to understand which group boards are a WASTE OF TIME?

Before we move to the solutions, I’d like to clarify why would you even care which group boards are efficient for you, and which are not.

First, it’s quite clear that group boards with low repin activity, make no good for your repin counts and do not bring you Pinterest traffic.

Second, we need to always remember that Pinterest is more of a search engine than a social network. Thus, we could find some analogies with how Google works. If a group board has a low quality, and you get links from it, those links might be considered as spammy and could do more harm than good to your pins.

I can’t tell you that I know it for sure, as Pinterest is not speculating around their algorithm. But it is very much possible (and other experienced bloggers would support me in this) that Pinterest is penalizing your account for being part of “bad” group boards and pinning on them.

Have you heard the term “engagement score”? It’s quite known in the social networking world. It means that if your content doesn’t get certain repin, comments, likes numbers, the social platforms understand that users don’t like your posts. A negative “karma” grows around your account, so even great new pins you are posting, don’t get anywhere high in the Pinterest smart feed.

Group boards in Pinterest Analytics

As you probably noticed before, Pinterest is not too generous sharing with us analytics for our pinning activity and traffic. But you still can get some information from Pinterest Analytics dashboard.

I would recommend you to focus on Clicks and maybe Repins, not on Impressions metric. Some large group boards may show high impressions and still, very few people will click on your pins from there.

To see the clicks count, follow this path: Analytics > Profile > Clicks > Boards with the most clicked Pins from the last 30 days > Show more

This data is useful if you want to understand which specific Pins on which boards work the best. You need to get back to the Pinterest Analitycs Overview page and then choose the last column on the right, which is about Activity from your site. You should find it also just by clicking on this URL https://analytics.pinterest.com/domain/

Here Pinterest shows you specific pins which perform the best for your site. You can then open the pin by clicking on the title, and you will see when and to which board the pin was published.

The problem in my case is that almost all top pins with the highest traffic generated to my site were not published by ME to the group boards. Most of them were published by other Pinterest users to their own boards, sometimes to group boards, but it’s still not showing me what I pinned on group boards.

By the way, I’ve been on Pinterest for over 9 months so far, and I’ve seen huge spikes in traffic when some of my pins went viral, with 30+ people on the site visiting the site simultaneously. I’ve got some posts with over 10k or close to 20k repins, which is huge for a Pinterest account with around 1000 followers.

My initial pins for those popular posts got some traction as I pushed them hard to group boards, but they never became the most popular pins! The ones that won me the highest repin counts and traffic were repins made by other users to their boards and to group boards. Most of the times, these users had even smaller Pinterest following than I do.

I gu s, this is a good point in understanding Pinterest algorithm. When you push your content, it helps others to find it. However, what Pinterest will show higher, is probably not what you pushed, but what people repined. I understand that for Pinterest, shares by other users, mean that others find your content interesting.

Pinterest Group Boards Analytics in Tailwind

Tailwind has a special page where you can filter your group boards by various metrics, one of them is engagement. If you never tried to use Tailwind, I recommend you at least to get yourself the free trial and see if you find it useful, as I do.

CLICK HERE TO TRY TAILWIND FOR FREE 

(You will get a $15 credit if you move to a paid plan sometime later, I can probably get a small commission for this, my disclosure policy is here).

To see Group Boards stats, you need to find Track Your Brand Page > Board Insights. Leave only Group boards checked.

I would focus on Virality metric, which means how many repins the group generates per Pin.

Why not Engagement Score? Well, this metric shows how many repins and pins the group has per follower. As a result, the groups with lowest follower numbers get highest Engagement Score. But for sure, you can’t get the same results from a board with 500 followers as from a board with 50k followers.

You don’t have to leave all the group boards with low virality (under 1 repin per pin) at the same time. If you are afraid to make such a drastic change all at once. Analyzing this data is quite fun. As you can see, I have a group with 53K followers and virality score of 2.69 repins per pin, and right below comes a board with less than 2k followers and quite close virality score (2.19)!

You can just stop pinning on those underperforming boards for a month or two, and see if this affects your traffic negatively. If those boards prove themselves as useless, getting out of them will be painless for you.

Here are some additional factors you should analyze to identify the good group boards

1. Look at the group board description. If it’s a group with no specific topic, most probably, its description will be very generic, with no keywords. So my guess is that all the content from such group boards doesn’t get high scores in the Pinterest algorithm because it’s hard to understand the relevance of the pin to the board when the board is not focused on any topic.

I analyzed several boards where pinners from all niches are welcome. I noticed that these boards, despite having 50k+ followers, do not appear in my Top-20 groups by virality. They have low virality. And looking at how full they are of spam, ads and misleading pins, I start thinking that being part of these groups can actually be bad for my account.

2. There is also another guess, coming from the previous point. The more open to new contributors a board is, the more spammers get onboard and damage its reputation. I read in some Pinterest-related Facebook threads that possibly, groups with too many contributors might be penalized by the algorithm. I’m not so sure about this point because some of the groups with the highest engagement scores for me have 1-4k contributors. On the other hand, if a huge board is properly administered and all the spammers are being expelled, then I suppose, even a big group board can be quite effective.

If you think this post was somehow useful for you, share it with other bloggers 🙂 You can save this pin to a Blogging tips board and get back to the instructions later if you don’t have time now to dig into your Pinterest analytics.

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How to Know Which Pinterest Group Boards Are Not Worth Your Time

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Instructions

1. HOW to understand which group boards are a WASTE OF TIME?
2. Group boards in Pinterest Analytics
3. Pinterest Group Boards Analytics in Tailwind
4. Here are some additional factors you should analyze to identify the good group boards

Anastasia Blogger

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.

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