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Is Pinterest still a place for entertainment?

theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

Is Pinterest still a place for entertainment or is it merely now a venue for advertisement? I've been on Pinterest for a couple of years. About a year ago I had 2.9 million monthly viewers. I took a break in the middle of this year and recently came back. I typically post 5-10 times per day, focusing on young adult entertainment like Marvel, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and my own works, with dedicated boards for each. I don't do any overt calls to action. I post drawings, videos, quotes, voice overs, poems, top ten lists, and book excepts. I use Pinterest as a way to test ideas as well as a portfolio. Since I started posting again, I've seen my monthly viewers drop to around 550,000. My oldest pins continue to get the most traction even though my newer pins are of higher quality. I continue do idea/story pins and I've slowly worked my way up to 5K followers. All of my new pins (except for idea pins) have less than 100 views. Additionally, I only create pins and don't save pins from other boards. Is there still room for content creators on Pinterest who don't advertise? For example, if you look at YouTube, free content largely out weighs advertisement. (Yes, music videos for example, are a form of advertisement, but the viewer wants to see those kind of things.) And TikTok seems similar. You don't really know what you are consuming is an advertisement or a promotion. But on Pinterest, the feeds seem full of overt advertisements. Free cooking, crafts, and DIY pins still seem big on Pinterest but free Arts and Entertainment pins seem suppressed. I like to make art for arts sake, but if no one is ever going to see it, I imagine I'd be better off on another channel or by just uploading to my website. Is there any benefit at all anymore for posting a picture, quote, or video purely for entertainment sake on Pinterest? Is the Pinterest completely driven now by monetization? I imagine in order to achieve any level of success now, you'd have to post twenty times per day, use an automatic scheduler, and buy regular advertisement. That model is not sustainable for small business or for people who want to maintain their mental health. Too much screen time is a bad thing. Sure Pinterest is a business, but I'm curious if new content continues to be suppressed, at what point will the content creators leave Pinterest. I'm just not sure if the way the new Pinterest is operating has its users and creators best interests at heart. Success on this platform now seems out of reach for the little guy.  theburntsunsetnovel 

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5 Replies
pinterestmarketingexpert
Jack-of-all-trades

Hello @theburntsunsetnovel 

Your instincts is correct. You MUST start investing in ads. That's the bottom line. 

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theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

@pinterestmarketingexpert 

Thanks for commenting. I wonder what it is going to take for organic content to go viral. I imagine not all content is going to be ad driven on Pinterest, otherwise, no one would visit the platform. Are you aware of any organic content that is consistently performing well on Pinterest? I'd love to see some examples.

thanks,

Chris

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pinterestmarketingexpert
Jack-of-all-trades

@theburntsunsetnovel You're so welcome. I can't share my client's success unfortunately. Pinterest doesn't share others performance that you don't own so I can't give you an example. 

1. Organic content is down. You gotta pay to play. That is the bottom line. 

2. I see your creating Idea Pins which  is great but you need to follow Pinterest's best practices. There are plenty of rules. You absolutely need to stop using the same images over and over. Pinterest has an algorithm that detects if your content has been recycled, rinse, repeat over and over. I can go on and on...

3. Use video in your first card versus static images and they should be at least 5-9 cards. They should teach your audience something. It has to be actionable. If you have no helpful content to share that would be challenging of course. 

Pinterest favors Idea Pins because they don't go to your website. It keeps the visitors on Pinterest which is what Pinterest wants. The longer people stay on, the greater chances you will respond to ads. With the advent of Pinterest TV it's going to get harder to compete with those type of content. 

Bottom line you have to invest in ads. Ads can be complicated. It isn't one size fits. 

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theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

@pinterestmarketingexpert thank you for your detailed response. I'm curious, do you know if algorithm detects the difference between different content on the same background? For example, I have more than one board dedicated to original poetry. Each pin I post has a unique poem on the same background. So there might be 200 poems with same background on one board. Does Pinterest view this as essentially one pin with 200 variations or 200 unique pins? And if I change the font and background a year later and create a new series with the same words, does Pinterest detect the next 200 as a repeats?

thanks,

Chris

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theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

@PinterestGabby do you know the answer to my question posed on 12/6/21? Is new text on the same background detected as a new pin or essentially a variation of the original pin? There are more details above.

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