[00:00:00] Jeff Sieh: Welcome to Social Media News Live I’m Jeff Sieh and you’re not and this is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the world of social media.

[00:00:08] Are you maybe a little Pinterested about Pinterest. Maybe you’ve heard that it can drive traffic, but you’re really not into. And harebrained tutorials, wedding cakes, or 2022 summer hair color. That’s really a thing, folks, if you’re really wondering if Pinterest is a fit for your business this is the show for you because I’ve got my good friend Alisa Meredith here, and we’re going to be talking all about.

[00:00:32] Tail, all about Pinterest and everything that we can, all your questions answered. If you don’t know who Alyssa is, she is the senior product manager at SEM rush, where she helps agencies offer new services to help their clients grow. She’s also a huge Pinterest nerd from the way back when, and one of the first Pinterest pioneers charged with helping people make the most of their Pinterest marketing.

[00:00:57] She’s also like my Pinterest mentor. Don’t tell her that she’ll get a big head, but. Alisa. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

[00:01:05] Alisa Meredith: I’m thrilled that it worked out. Jeff. I’ve been missing this, so yeah.

[00:01:09] Jeff Sieh: Thank you for coming at the last moment, but I wanted to, before we really dove into Pinterest and I’ll let people get all their questions ready in their mind to ask you.

[00:01:18] But today’s show is brought to you by our friends over at Ecamm and you can find out more information and, download the product by going to socialmedianewslive.com/ecamm. Great Prague, product and program. That’s what we use for our show. But one of the cool things.

[00:01:38] That they’re doing right now, they’re cooking this up in their labs. So we know that lifestyle selling is hot. We go over to Amazon every week and put the show over there. But Stephanie Lu is starting her second season of show runner, her show called showrunner. And it’s focusing on.

[00:01:55] Live selling. So you can actually go to a live selling to get some reminders and sign up to get to let yourself know when the show starts. And she’s going to be our guest on next week’s show. So this is what I suggest is that you go watch her. So show runner show. It’s going to be on next Thursday.

[00:02:16] You can sign up once again at ecamm.tv/liveselling Watch the show, get a ton of questions, take a bunch of notes, and then come back to our show. The next day at 10:00 AM central on Friday, because she’s going to be on with, on our show on the sixth. So get those questions ready and we’ll do a deep dive on line selling.

[00:02:33] So sound like a plan. Yeah. Cool. I’ll see you there next week. So Ecamm dot TV forge slash live selling. Here we go Pinterest, your favorite subject. So I want to do this because there’s a lot of people who still don’t get Pinterest. They don’t understand it. So let’s do a big backup and just okay, I’ve heard Pinterest.

[00:02:59] I have looked over and seen my wife or girlfriend or whoever, on their doing stuff. What is it? And talk somebody is totally clueless about Pinterest. What would it be?

What is Pinterest in a Nutshell?

[00:03:10] Alisa Meredith: A year ago or maybe a year and a half ago, I would have said it’s a visual search and discovery engine, but I think now we have to add, it’s also a little bit of a social platform.

[00:03:21] Would

[00:03:21] Jeff Sieh: you say that really? You think it’s social good?

[00:03:24] Alisa Meredith: I would say that. And the only reason why is idea pins and the comments that you get on them? I didn’t expect it. But I get a lot of them, but I’d be curious to see if anybody else gets them as well. But to me that really has changed the nature of the platform and it’s what they wanted and it actually seems to be working.

[00:03:44] Jeff Sieh: So you think that idea pins are there? Cause I, to be honest, I see comments, but I don’t look at them because they’re usually spammy aren’t they? More spammy? Wouldn’t you say they’re more spammy than no.

[00:03:56] Alisa Meredith: I think it depends. Who sees your pins and what you’re sharing probably to some extent, but the ones I get are actually really good.

[00:04:08] Jeff Sieh: Are they you’re painting the day from your painting idea pins? Is that what yeah. Yeah,

[00:04:13] Alisa Meredith: I do have, yeah, I have some that are for Pinterest marketing, but the ones that have the real engagement or the painting ones. Yeah. So people have specific questions or they comment about what it looks like to them.

[00:04:26] And I find that for the most part.

[00:04:29] Jeff Sieh: Okay. I can, I’ll give you that. I just, maybe I am so comments for such a long time. If you’re an old time Pinterest person, we’re so spammy and join my board or what all this stuff, and I’ve just tuned out. So I guess I need to dive in there.

[00:04:44] Alisa Meredith: They were so spammy in fact, that Pinterest deleted.

[00:04:49] They just said, let’s start over. And it was a great move because they were able to get the bots out of there and to only allow actual comments.

[00:04:56] Jeff Sieh: So Amy says a good comments, I think are based on what your niche is. So I would, I think now, is it only on idea pins or is on your regular pins too? That their comments as well, because that’s how much I tune them out.

[00:05:10] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Just idea pins. If you went on there and you did your woodcarving, we did a demonstration on that. You would get nice comments.

[00:05:16] Jeff Sieh: We’ll have to just test it out. And Camilla says my comments are rarely spammy, so spam my, but I think she meant spammy, but yes,

[00:05:26] Alisa Meredith: spammy is that your niche?

[00:05:29] Camilla and it looks like cooking, maybe

[00:05:31] Jeff Sieh: okay. Let’s okay. So if they’re trying to be more social, do you think that is a play? Do you think. That matters to the platform? Or do you think people go to Pinterest to be Social?

[00:05:48] Alisa Meredith: It is a play. It does matter. And I think it’s changing, right?

[00:05:54] So we had that year in the, during the pandemic that gen Z really flocked to Pinterest as a way to figure out how to do things like little projects you could do at home or how to do your sourdough. So even though people like you and meet, old people it’s like I have a project I’m going to do or I want to collect ideas to do a thing or to buy a thing.

[00:06:19] People are coming from TikTok generation, and they’re coming on to Pinterest and what they want is different from what you and I want. So Pinterest is giving it to them and it seems to be.

[00:06:32] Jeff Sieh: So you’re pretty much saying, because I don’t read the comments. I’m pretty much saying get off my lawn and I need to start.

[00:06:36] Totally. Yeah,

[00:06:37] Alisa Meredith: I understand. I say this literally.

[00:06:39] Jeff Sieh: Yes. Yes. Okay. Alrighty. So I’ll have to start diving in. Why should, once again, bird’s eye view, people who are totally unfamiliar with Pinterest, why should businesses take a second? Look at Pinterest.

Why You Should Take A Second Look At Pinterest

[00:06:54] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. I think the reason for that has changed as well.

[00:06:58] So a couple of years ago we would have said, it’s for the referral traffic, right? You could get a ton of free referral traffic from Pinterest to your website. That is not so much the case anymore. I think some pinners are still having success there, but it’s they’re few and far between I believe.

[00:07:17] So it’s a lot of it in my opinion now has to do with awareness. So getting people to see your product is key, right? And that’s where idea pins come in. And if you look at the distribution of your pins, if you compare videos and static images to idea pins, there’s no contest. It’s very obvious what Pinterest wants to promote.

[00:07:42] So you have to think about what could this Type of content do for me. And one of the things it can do is if you are an Ecammerce seller and you have your catalog on Pinterest, which is really easy to do with Shopify and now Woo.Commerce has an integration too you can tag your products in idea pins.

[00:08:02] Now I do that. And it hasn’t, it has not worked for me. But in theory, it could be a great way to sell your products in a very entertaining, engaging, kind of format.

[00:08:15] Jeff Sieh: So I agree. And so with this WooCommerce thing, and I have not tested yet, but are you able to sell digital products or is it still only physical?

[00:08:23] Alisa Meredith: So you can you can create a a product feed for digital product. However, I tried to do this, myself, followed all the rules and it kept getting rejected and rejected. And like I said I, I tried to appeal it and just never got anywhere, even though you should be. Yeah, but I couldn’t get it to work and they couldn’t tell me why.

[00:08:47] Jeff Sieh: So I’m really looking forward to, because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. My site is WordPress. And so I’m trying to. That instead of, doing some Shopify stuff. So I want to go back to some of our amazing people with their comments. Camille says, yes, that was recipes show. She was that was her niche.

[00:09:07] And Brian says, and this is my, what I had for me. It was like comments and messages where people kept sending me their pins. That’s where I still have a lot of that going on. Messages or that we’re talking about, comments are different than messages. Comments were actually on your pin.

[00:09:24] They actually have their own emojis. Pitchers has it’s. Yeah. The reactions.

[00:09:31] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. When you’re like, oh, this is a great idea. Or I love

[00:09:33] Jeff Sieh: this. Yeah. So those are cool. I do like those. So Jackie says I don’t have much spam. I did see my idea pins views lower over the months after the initial burst for me.

[00:09:46] Yes. But it’s going in waves. And when we get to idea pins, Some of like best practices for that. So don’t, let’s put a pin in that because I want to come back to it. Sabrina says interesting. Pinterest always said that they were not as social network, but a search engine has their mission changed.

[00:10:03] That’s a great question, Sabrina. So yeah, they also said that don’t use hashtags, then they said to use them and they said to know again. So if there’s one constant about.

Has Pinterest’s Mission Changed?

[00:10:14] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Yeah, but they did make a pretty big announcement at, there was a Pinterest presents maybe two years ago now. And they said, we used to be a platform to connect.

[00:10:25] Pinners and. And I still do that to an extent. But we really want to expand to be a platform that connects pinners with creators. So their definition of creators is basically anyone who makes something doesn’t matter what it is. They just, there, the concentration is more on the people now.

[00:10:43] Which is interesting. It’s not what we went there for originally. You know what they want it and it seems to be working.

[00:10:51] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. And let’s say Tori says I need to learn how to share my sandbox again. So yeah, I probably do. I probably need to be a little more social on there all so the, we did the one-on-one thing on Pinterest okay.

[00:11:08] Let’s say somebody decides, okay, Pinterest, you made sense. You convince me I want the traffic from there. I want to have the, the The exposure on Pinterest with my brand. What do I need to do first on Pinterest? So I’ve not done it before. If I’ve never been on the planet.

What Should I Do First On Pinterest?

[00:11:27] Alisa Meredith: Okay. So you’ve never done it before.

[00:11:30] Well You need to set up an account and claim your website, right? And that claiming your website is very important because Pinterest wants to give you as a content creator credit, I guess we could say for your work. So do do claim it that way, your account will get all the juice when that content is shared.

[00:11:49] Another thing to do is think about your boards So there was a time when we would say everyone should have these seven boards because they’re engaging and people love them. No it really needs to be based on the content that you are creating. If you are not regularly creating content on a topic, you might not need a board for it.

[00:12:12] But if you look at look at your blog, post categories, look at your product categories, you’re going to need a board for each of those likely.

[00:12:23] Jeff Sieh: All right. So we’ve talked about for the business. There’s also a way that you can claim not just your website, but also claim your YouTube and your, oh, you’re gonna talk about this and Instagram, your Instagram, and also isn’t Shopify. Isn’t that another one? What all, can you claim that it was Etsy?

[00:12:45] Alisa Meredith: Etsy? Yeah. So now I’ll only have on on mobile. This is changing all the time. I have Instagram, so I can’t claim other accounts and sometimes I don’t have the option. Like I don’t see an Instagram connection, so there’s something going on. I think what I read in community and I strongly recommend if you’re interested in Pinterest that you join their community because you’ll find out about things like this, it wasn’t really working great.

[00:13:14] So I think they’ll probably bring it back, but right now, I have nothing like I’m looking on desktop right now. I can claim my websites and that is it.

[00:13:23] Jeff Sieh: No. Cause I had everything claimed there for awhile.

[00:13:29] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. So did I, but it’s just, it’s gone. I bet they’ll bring it back, but I don’t know for sure.

[00:13:34] Jeff Sieh: You’re right. See, that’s why I have you on the show. Because that was great. Cause what happens if somebody pinned your stuff, you to get credit for it. So that’s really interesting. And one of the things you have to check. Check because things are different between mobile and desktop a lot.

[00:13:54] And so you’re like this was on mobile. Why can’t I find on desktop and vice versa? We will, I remember

[00:13:59] Alisa Meredith: you had even on something different on your tablet. You didn’t have it on desktop or mobile, but it was on your tablet. How was that?

[00:14:06] Jeff Sieh: It came to my tablet first. So we’ll talk about that a little bit later.

[00:14:10] Yeah, yeah. Phoebe says I’m on a laptop and I can’t claim anything other than Instagram or Shopify, so I didn’t even see Shopify. So it’s just anyway,

[00:14:24] Alisa Meredith: Okay. The option is really, so you can connect the app and have your feed set up. You should be able to see that.

[00:14:31] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. And Brian says he has the only ability to claim the, his website too.

[00:14:33] So yeah, one of the things too, you always have to be careful if you don’t have like your app or you’re on your iPad. Set to auto update. Pinterest comes out probably more than any other platform updates to their app. And so I’m always having to go in there and mainly do it. Cause I don’t like to have things automatically update cause I’m just a control freak.

[00:14:55] Alisa Meredith: It’s fun to be able to purposely go look at the app, then update it and come back and see if you can tell which. Yeah, exactly. Super nerdy, but

[00:15:05] Jeff Sieh: yeah, Tori says it’s like throwing darts. Good times. Yeah. That’s yeah. Put a glass half full a Tori. That’s the way to look at it. So what is the biggest mistake when you see people starting out?

[00:15:19] What’s the biggest mistake that you see them make? I guess we could preface this in 20, 22, because things are different now than they used to be. Like, you could claim your website, claiming your Instagram and all that stuff. So what does. What do you think the biggest mistake is?

[00:15:34] Alisa Meredith: I I think it’s, I think it is having expectations that are no longer valid.

[00:15:42] So maybe you read a blog post from 2018 that talked about how much traffic you could get by sharing the same static image over and over again, the more you share it, the better you can get lots of activity by sharing other people’s content. Like you don’t even have to have your own content.

[00:16:00] Those things may have worked for a time to some extent they don’t work now.

[00:16:06] Jeff Sieh: Great. Now that being said, I still get most of my traffic from Pinterest. That’s great. Yeah. And I still think it has the longest shelf life. It’s not as long as it used to be, but it’s way longer than if you see the other platforms like Twitter or Facebook, I’m all about trying to get the most juice out of my content.

[00:16:27] Pinterest still lasts the longest. So that is still until that changes. That’s still like my number one thing.

[00:16:34] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. And I think. Big mistake. People make as a, they go on Pinterest. They try it for a few weeks. They don’t see anything happening and they decided it’s not going to work. Pinterest is not Instagram, right?

[00:16:47] You post on Instagram and you’re going to get some instant gratification. You’re get some comments, some likes it’s going to be fun. Pinterest is a little bit more like search engine marketing. In that you put all this work into it. You really work hard, put great content out and it’s crickets for a little while but if you hang on, like it starts to pick up and then it starts to snowball and it lasts a very long time. Like you said,

[00:17:13] Jeff Sieh: that’s a great point. So that’s what the thing is. Pinterest is a long play. It’s like SEO, just like Alisa said, it’s a long play, but you re reap the benefits. And the thing is, it’s the reason I did it.

[00:17:24] It’s one of the easiest platforms to, because yes, you pin things and, but you have to be consistent. And Kind of a flip side of that. What is a best practice that you see people forget about the most on Pinterest? What that, that w if they would just do this one thing and do it consistently, they would probably find success on Pinterest.

How Do You Find Success on Pinterest?

[00:17:50] Alisa Meredith: I’m I’m torn on this one. So you really cannot have a successful Pinterest account without a successful content strategy, which often goes back to your website or your online store. So thinking about. What am I going to post on Pinterest? It depends on what you’re creating for your business. And so just to create for Pinterest, with nothing to lead back to your site, or no compelling reason to go from Pinterest to your site is going to be a mistake.

[00:18:21] And the other one I think is just ignoring idea pins. So yeah, Pinterest is a totally a long game, but with idea pens, I don’t know about you, but I almost always see quite a bit of distribution at the beginning. And then. Depending on who knows, maybe it’s depending on engagement. I don’t exactly know, but then it will drop off and it will come back in a few weeks and it’s like rolling Hills of analytics but it’s something happening, which I think is encouraging, especially when you’re starting out.

[00:18:54] You need that. Yeah.

[00:18:56] Jeff Sieh: And I totally. At the beginning. And I, they’re still not my favorite, but you’re right when we’ll talk about that in a little bit. So we’ve talked about kind of Pinterest 1 0 1. Why to do it, why businesses should be on it? I think the biggest hiccup and tell me if I’m wrong, that people you will, they get there, you get their mind around.

[00:19:19] Is that. It’s another graph. It’s the vertical. I think now that there’s more vertical video and there’s more people are used to taking this type of photos on their phone for such a long time. It was just so hard for one to create an image for one more platform. And I think that really threw people off.

[00:19:38] And now I think it’s the struggle of, oh, I got your idea pins. That’s like doing TikTok or, a real, and that’s a struggle for people. Do you think those were the struggles now that.

[00:19:52] Alisa Meredith: Yeah, but they’re already creating that content. So if you are creating content for TikTok, fantastic.

[00:20:00] You can repurpose that as a pen, so you don’t want to record it in any kind of apps, native camera though. You want to record it on your regular camera and then use it all as platforms because none of the platforms like to see a watermark from another platform

[00:20:15] Jeff Sieh: They will actually drop it in the algorithm.

[00:20:18] Alisa Meredith: Yes, they will.

[00:20:18] Yeah, but you. Most people whose content is going to do really great on Pinterest are already creating that content. So for example with my painting idea pins, I was already recording my process mostly for myself. I wanted to see what happens when I do this, or I use these colors or. Cause I, I hated it when I get to the end of a painting and be like, I could never recreate this.

[00:20:43] Cause I don’t remember what I did. It was really for myself and some people are doing this already. Even if it’s not for marketing. So just take what you already have and repackage it in an appealing way and an idea.

[00:20:57] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, I totally agree. And there’s I actually Rachel Peterson, who is the, I think the tech talk expert had a training yesterday and she talked about, there are some apps that actually will, you can actually remove the watermark, the TikTok watermark, if you forget, or have you already done it some other way, so you can look for those, but yeah, repurposing.

[00:21:15] To be honest, I repurpose a lot of this show as idea pins and they do really. Overall on, on on Pinterest. And I’ve been doing that for the last couple of months and I actually have been putting them to TikTok as well. So yeah, all that stuff. And yeah, Jackie who says definitely repurpose content agreed.

[00:21:37] Especially, TikTok. Now, let you go up to 10 minutes with your video. So sometimes things that you thought were too long over on Pinterest, you can write. Move over and I used gosh, there’s an app that actually chops up the video easily. I can’t remember what it’s cut story. That’s what it is.

[00:21:55] It allows you to do that. So you can get those scenes for Pinterest and all sorts of things. Yeah, I definitely agree. Before we move on from the Pinterest kind of one-on-one let’s see Tory has another great question and I know that you get a lot. She goes, what quantity. Fresh pins.

[00:22:13] Do we need daily and weekly, but first of all, real quick, where are fresh pins? Are they straight from the grocery? What are you talking about? Fresh pins.

What Are Fresh Pins on Pinterest?

[00:22:22] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Oh man. It feels like we talked about this a whole lot. A couple of years ago. Fresh pins, Pinterest definition is a new image, video or idea pan for a new piece of content on your way.

[00:22:37] Does that mean you can never like make an idea pin, a static pin and a video pin for the same content? No, you can do that. Does that mean you can never say oh this idea Penn didn’t do great. I think the content is really amazing. I need to put a different spin on a different angle to attract the right people.

[00:22:57] Yeah, you can absolutely do that too.

[00:23:01] Jeff Sieh: Yep. Totally agree.

[00:23:03] Alisa Meredith: Numbers. She wanted to know numbers. That one there’s no answer. When you say, what quantity do you need, like need for. So it depends on what you’re trying to do. Pinterest recommends once a week, and when you’re talking about idea pins, that’s plenty, it takes some serious time to, to make them. But it used to be that pinners would share 20, 30, 50. Pins a day. And unless you are Amazon or you’re creating a hundred new products a day, you just cannot sustain that. So it’s going to be based on like your content that you’re creating, like how much content are you putting out that you can reasonably turn into engaging pins and share.

[00:23:53] Jeff Sieh: Very cool. Let’s talk about. You know that cause a lot of people ask that question because they have unlike Dustin’s stout. So he said Pinterest has faded as a top traffic source for me, probably because I stopped focusing on it. And then he goes, he thought for a while there, that was a massive traffic source for him.

[00:24:13] So I think a lot of these questions, like how many fresh pins do I need? Because people see their their like traffic from printers go down and they’re like, oh, how many more do I need to create? To make it go back to where it was or exceed that, like if 10 pins were great, then what if I do 20, that would be even better.

[00:24:33] And that’s not usually the same thing. Should they look at okay, for some reason that is not resonating with people on the platform and that’s why I’m not getting traffic. So I need to change designs instead of maybe thinking about, oh, I need to just constantly create new images for a certain blog article.

[00:24:52] Do you see what I’m say? Okay. What do you think they should focus on for first? Should they work on redesigning it and not just like cranking out a, a bunch of pins and maybe worry about the quality of the pin instead of the quantity.

Quanlity vs Quantity on Pinterest?

[00:25:09] Alisa Meredith: Yes, please. You were feeding me that one. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:25:13] It’s quality over quantity. And when we’re talking about quality on. Pinterest There’s a lot that goes into it. So the image needs to look great. But there’s also a relevant score that goes on with Pinterest which similar to when you do a Facebook ad, and you’ll get that relevant score.

[00:25:31] Like how well does the ad tie into the. Piece of content that you’re linking to you. And then on Facebook you’ll pay less, the higher your relevancy score is well on Pinterest. They want your pins to be relevant to your content as well, because what they don’t want is for someone to click on a pin that showing like how to garden with containers.

[00:25:55] And then they send you to an article that has to do with shoes, that bait and switch and. that’s Obvious, and we would never do that, but it’s even, there’s even more than that. So it’s, if you’re showing a photograph of a container garden and it’s linking to your blog post about container gardens it’s good.

[00:26:19] If you can have very similar images from pin to post. Does it mean you can’t experiment, but generally they want to see consistency between the pin, the title of the pen, the description of the pin and what is on the website. Cause they actually do they look at that.

[00:26:37] Jeff Sieh: And would you say that Pinterest is still forgiving of experimentation?

[00:26:42] If you’re, I think it’s one of the most, the biggest one that lets you do stuff. So I would say that it’s okay to experiment. Don’t freak out, trying new things.

[00:26:53] Alisa Meredith: Yeah, just don’t be don’t go overboard with quantity, especially. Yeah.

[00:26:58] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So let’s talk real quick about the state of Pinterest in 2022.

[00:27:02] So let’s say, oh gosh, Alisa, you ha you’ve. You’ve told me everything. I need to know. This is amazing why I haven’t been on Pinterest yet. So am I too late to the party? If I try to start account and go to Pinterest right now?

Idea Pins on Pinterest

[00:27:18] Alisa Meredith: Oh, now it isn’t. And I think part of that has to do with idea pins. There are some people who have been on Pinterest a long time who just will not use ideas.

[00:27:29] So there’s less competition for those who will use them. Excuse me. And just to mention the reason people resist idea pins is that you can’t link to your website, but can link to your products. And they do get incredible distribution. So should you use that? Yeah. Yeah. And because it’s that’s changed the nature of Pinterest at all.

[00:27:54] Almost it feels like a little bit of a reset. So if you’re coming in you don’t have to feel like you’re never going to succeed because everyone’s been on here forever.

[00:28:03] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. And I think that because idea pins are relatively new there’s, I think it’s still the wild west. And my thing is listen, Your S if you creating idea pins and on Pinterest, you are doing more than probably your competition is because it’s still most people aren’t taking the time to do that.

[00:28:23] And so you are getting ahead by doing stuff like that. Amy has a really specific question. She goes, can you use the same words use on your site as the description for your pen? And you’re talking about the images being, similar going across from pen to that, would it make sense to do the same thing with the.

[00:28:39] Yeah,

[00:28:40] Alisa Meredith: absolutely. So they do look at things like meta-tags on your source page. And see if I can match it up with your pin.

[00:28:47] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So we’ve had this question before, but w was, we’ve talked about it before, but I thought it was good to bring it up. Is there any businesses that you wouldn’t recommend to be on?

Businesses That Shouldn’t Be on Pinterest?

[00:28:59] Jeff Sieh: Remember, we got in trouble. We said this earlier. I said I said mortician. And we actually had morticians. And say, yeah, you can do counseling stuff and dah. And I’m like, so I don’t say it anymore. So is there anything that you wouldn’t say couldn’t be on Pinterest?

[00:29:16] Alisa Meredith: I think you could make a case for just about any business. I think there are some that are much more obvious fit that are going to be less of a struggle and more rewarding. So for instance something that is always trending on Pinterest are nail designs. EV, I don’t know. I’ve never looked at the trends and not seeing nails of some sort pop up.

[00:29:43] So if you’re in one of those obvious industries, it’s going to be a lot easier and a lot more fun than if you’re in. I don’t know. Yeah. or Social Media or morticians even though, I guess it could work now with idea pins where you could become the counselor for people who lost somebody like that.

[00:30:07] That could actually work really well.

[00:30:09] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, cause I’ve seen pet like bereavement stuff, like for pet cemeteries and stuff beyond there. I’m like what? And there, I think anything where you can show something visually we’ll do what you said. I’ve seen submit things in there, how to pour around your fire pit, how to do all this stuff.

[00:30:26] I’ve seen the thing that really, even like rug cleaning, which I thought was so like localized. And we had a question about local businesses, if there could be on Pinterest and they can, because this pin had, and I used to use it in my talks all the time was, had so many views to it. It was a before and after, and they showed what they did.

[00:30:47] They showed this disgusting rug and then how beautiful they made it after and people ate it up. And and then they gave rug team. It clicked over to, how to clean your own rug, but if you can’t, here’s us. So I think creative,

[00:31:03] Alisa Meredith: But, okay, so that was a local business, that you’re talking about. Okay they might have a million views on their content, but how many of those people, one. Are in their local area, like their service area and two we’ll click over and find them. It’s a very small number. So when a local business asked me about this, I’ll say you can do it, but you’re going to be working hard to get distribution to people who could never hire.

[00:31:32] Jeff Sieh: That’s a great point.

[00:31:35] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Yeah. But you can what I would suggest for local business is to try advertising because you can target by zip code city, all that good.

Driving Pinterest Traffic But No Conversions

[00:31:45] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, I that’s, what I would suggest too, is the advertising because, and Brian and I actually had a conversation about this over in volley, and you can actually get a chat with us anytime at Social Media News, Live dot com forward slash chat.

[00:31:58] It’s our volley channel where we can leave messages back and forth. But Brian was saying that too, because he’s a photographer. He does a wedding photographer and he was getting all this traffic from Pinterest, but it wasn’t. There are a lot of looky-loos. They were seeing that, maybe even like looking for a style, but that’s a real struggle for people.

[00:32:15] Like I’ve got this product and Pinterest is. It’s working as driving traffic. So you have to re

[00:32:23] Alisa Meredith: there’s another thing, and this may be more than a person wants to do. But if you find, if you’re finding that you’re getting that tons of traffic and lots of engagement, but you’re not getting your local business of the business that you want.

[00:32:37] Is there something you could create that these people could buy? So I know you remember my very first Pinterest client and I’ll never forget either. Yeah, he was a nutritionist. And he was a pharmacist, but he had an online, like he had a virtual or like a long distance co consulting he would do.

[00:33:00] So if you could add something like that, we’re at a course or something that people can buy from anywhere, then you can make more out of that traffic.

[00:33:09] Jeff Sieh: That’s a great point. Did you get that, Brian? Because. It’s something that you, because you’re a great photographer, you can teach a lot of people on how to do photography.

[00:33:16] We’ll talk offline too, but yeah. Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. So let’s use the rest of our time. Cause we only got a little bit left. So you guys make sure you ask your questions of Lisa while we still got her. Cause she was nice enough to drop everything. I think, when you giving a dog a bath, I’m not sure what you’re doing, but anyway, she dropped everything and came in.

[00:33:35] To help us out today. But one of the things I want to talk about is idea pens, because we’ve mentioned them before. What they are like stories that live forever that are tied to your account on Pinterest that have up to 20 different panels. They can be images or video. You can actually go on.

[00:33:54] Kind of afterwards a little bit, but they are tied to your account. They don’t go away. You can go at it. I think it’s up to a week. You can edit some things. Yeah. I never do it cause I’m so perfect. I never have any problems. Of course. But they are really hot right now. They’re driving traffic.

[00:34:13] They and we won’t have time to get to it, but I’m part of the creator hub that pays creators to make. Idea pins and it’s a hot mess right now. I know you’re looking bad. You don’t get it. You’re not missing.

[00:34:27] Alisa Meredith: I’m just checking it. And for the very first time, I is here. My entire creator hub disappeared for weeks and I just went on today and I have created a rewards new $0.

[00:34:40] Jeff Sieh: That’s probably why they dropped all the prices because they are letting Lisa on.

[00:34:45] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Yeah. They don’t want to give me any money.

[00:34:49] Jeff Sieh: But anyway, idea pins. So they don’t link out. You can’t like link to your blog post or something like that. You can use it.

[00:34:58] Alisa Meredith: Okay. You can link to your products.

[00:35:00] Jeff Sieh: That’s what. And that’s key. Yeah. And you can have affiliate links. Like I can, there’s a certain amount of affiliates that let you do not every affiliate, but like Amazon’s one of them. So you can have I could do an idea pin about all the stuff I used to go live with my microphone, my stream deck.

[00:35:15] And I can link out to all of those products over on Amazon.

[00:35:20] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. And people always ask how about this program or that program? And it’s just try it because if it’s not an approved affiliate, the link just plain won’t work, you’re not going to break anything or getting any trouble by trying.

[00:35:33] So just give it a try.

[00:35:34] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Yeah. And so like best. And the other thing is, would you not say that this has made your profile even more important on Pinterest? Because that’s the only link that you get.

[00:35:46] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Yeah. At the end of your idea pen, there’s going to be a link to follow or go to your profile.

[00:35:53] Yeah. So what they see depends on whether you have a store or not. They might see your. What is it your shop or your S created or your saved, if you don’t have a shot, they’re going to see your created pins. Yeah. Make sure they’re good.

[00:36:10] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So that’s going to any other best practices before you go that we need to talk about before for idea pens, because they, you need to do them.

[00:36:19] They do live forever. They’re tied to your account.

[00:36:23] Alisa Meredith: I would say keep the watch for idea pin app. They were going to come out in February. I haven’t seen them yet, but in the dashboard or ad. Yeah. It’s there are columns for the data, which is funny because you can’t actually do it yet, but I think that’s going to be really powerful.

[00:36:43] And you’ll be able to link to anything you want when you pay. Yes. So I think that’s going to make obviously harder for the rest of the people who aren’t paying. But I can’t wait to try.

[00:36:59] Jeff Sieh: Cool. Do you have time for one more question? Yep. Okay. This is from Dennis C he goes I’ve heard that Pinterest doesn’t support Etsy any longer.

[00:37:09] My steady pins still seemed to connect to my Etsy product. Have you heard anything about that?

[00:37:14] Alisa Meredith: No, I haven’t. I, again, I would go into the community. So it’s community.pinterest.com. I think it redirects you, but I don’t know. I would think it would still be. Bring in your shoppable pins or like your Bible pins don’t

[00:37:30] Jeff Sieh: know, not Bible.

[00:37:33] That’s I always do the same thing. Buyable. Yeah. Yeah. It’s buyable. Yeah.

[00:37:38] Alisa Meredith: Yeah. But as far as you can paint anything you want from any site, just whether it’s one of those ones that has the price and all that good stuff on it.

[00:37:48] Jeff Sieh: So before we go, cause I know you’ve gotta run. Where can people find out about all the things Alyssa.

Where to Find Out More About Alisa Meredith?

[00:37:56] Alisa Meredith: Okay it’s Alisa and Meredith on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, and my website, Alyssa meredith.com. I would love to hear from.

[00:38:08] Jeff Sieh: Yes. Awesome. And by the way, she is also Alisa winch and she will show up, but she’s also in our volley group. So I know we cut this one a little bit short today, but she will answer your questions.

[00:38:18] If you go to Social Media News, Live dot com forward slash chat you can join our volley group. It’s a really cool thing. We’re gonna be talking about it more and lets you communicate directly for us with us. It’s asynchronous. So it’s like voicemail, video mail, a thing. And we can talk back and forth.

[00:38:33] It’s very cool. socialmedianewslive.com/chat Thank you so much for being here and by the way, you guys thank you guys for showing up for this show. Sabrina, Ian Tori, Jackie, all you guys. Thank you. Let us know what you think about this Pinterest episode. Would you like some more?

[00:38:49] Cause we would love to talk about. Let us know down below in the comments and with that, make sure you tune in next week, we’ll be talking about live selling was Stephanie Lu. That is on Friday, May 6th at 11:00 AM. Eastern 10:00 AM central. And we’re always on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Amazon live.

[00:39:08] We’re also a podcast we’d love for you guys to leave us a rating and review. Make sure you just go to your favorite podcast player, do a search and we will be right there. And we’d love for that rating review. And with that, we’ll see you guys next time. Bye everybody. We’ll see you next week.