- Are you on Pinterest?
It’s hard to believe, but people have been on Facebook for over 5 years. In some ways, it still feels like a new medium. Yet in other ways, I long for the way it used to be. Think back to your early days on Facebook, if you’ve been on there for several years. Remember when it was just friends and family? And you saw pictures of children, reconnected with high school and college buddies…..it was grand!
And then they introduced the “Facebook feed” and initially people HATED it, but we grew to love it, didn’t we? We heard witty thoughts from our friends, posted about family gatherings, and dutifully read every.single.item.in.our.feed.every.day. When was the last time you did that? We became fans of fun & silly pages like bacon and “I hate this song, so why do I know all the words?” and helped dogs wearing tinfoil hats get more fans than Glenn Beck.
Well, it didn’t take bloggers long to realize that their friends were posting links all the time…….and what better way to get in front of a bunch of people, than to put your blog feed in front of hundreds if not thousands of fans. And our page views soared. Businesses quickly followed suit and built pages faster than you could say “social media.” Best of all, it’s free!
Then came along Twitter, and if you’ve been on Twitter from some time……..again I’ll ask you to think back to when it was just you & your fun followers. It was a good time. The honeymoon with Twitter was much shorter, as bloggers and businesses already savvy to Facebook, were much quicker to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. Now you can’t banter back & forth with friends and followers without constant interruptions from big brands asking you what you’re cooking for your holiday meal or what are you ‘must have’ items to pack for vacation. A one-hour Twitter “party” is hardly a party to those not participating, and frankly, makes Twitter a lot less fun at times. (There are ways to block #hashtags by the way, so if you find your stream hijacked by a Twitter party, block the hashtag they’re using.)
For the record, I am on both Facebook and Twitter with at least two blogs. In some ways I enjoy it and in some ways I view it as a blogging chore that I must do if I want people to read my blog.
And now comes along Pinterest. Forget all the chatter about Facebook being drowned out by Google+, if anything it will be Pinterest first. I initially declined all offers for invites to Pinterest, mainly because I thought it was all about doing crafts. Crafts that I don’t have either the desire nor the time to do. So I passed. Then I learned two things:
One is that it’s being used for recipes and other items of interest to me, like frugal living and special needs parenting.
And then someone said (typed, actually) the magic words: “It’s increasing my page views and it’s my number one source of traffic right now.” Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
With the recent Facebook changes and how Facebook is changing what shows up in your feed, many bloggers saw their traffic from Facebook fall off the planet. Big, huge dips in our stats. And as most bloggers will tell you, even if your Twitter followers aren’t annoyed with the Twitter parties, the overall click-through rate on Twitter is painfully low. We had to check Pinterest out!
So I did. And before I even poked around much, I started pinning like crazy. See, it’s a virtual bulletin board, for those of you not familiar. And you “pin” photos that interest you in different categories. And these photos are linked to a site, some place. In most cases, blogs. So if you see a photo of mine that you like, you view it and you can see the source and then click-through to my site. And, you can repin it, thus perhaps getting me even more page views. So I pinned a few dozen posts of mine, from both blogs. I dug up frugal and fun recipes that were two or three years old, dusted them off, added a “Pin This” icon, and reposted and pinned. And I did see an increase in traffic on both of my sites.
And then something else happened. I took a step back, started looking around, viewing what my friends were pinning, following more people……..and basically, I like it. Like, really like it. I’m cooking some of the recipes, making plans to put some of the frugal living ideas into place. It’s fun. If you’re a visual person, you’ll love it. It’s peaceful, there are no words unless you want to read words.
And here’s the thing. I’m so exhausted with all the “noise” on Facebook, I’m afraid the same thing is going to happen to Pinterest. And that makes me sad. Because now bloggers are doing tutorials for other bloggers, on how to make your posts and photos more “pinnable.” In several blogging groups I’m in, I’ve heard (read) bloggers say that they are changing the focus of their blogs’ content, just to make it more appealing to Pinterest fans. How long will it be before big corporations have their PR and Social Media people setting up accounts, to pin their stuff? I know for a fact it’s already happening. So instead of the fun photo you see with an organizational method from a crafty blogger, it will be from P&G Everyday Solutions. Recipes? Forget the moms and foodie blogs, it will be all the food brands.
Can we do anything about this? I don’t know. I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see what develops. I know that I am approaching it pretty cautiously, and only following people and boards that I have an interest in. I’m not doing automatic follow-backs to people who follow me–I check out their stuff first. And I unfollow specific boards that are of no interest to me. I don’t want Pinterest to turn into all the “noise” I get on Facebook. Because right now, it’s my escape. Because it’s beautifully quiet over there, and I hope it stays that way.
VERY interesting Lisa. I do have to say though, I do know someone (not me!) that got an email recently about being overly promotional on Pinterest. They had a disproportionate amount of pins from their own site and were basically told that that wasn’t the goal of Pinterest.
So I do think Pinterest is guarding their asset pretty closely.
However, just as Facebook now has “sponsored stories” and there are hashtags for #ad #sponsored etc on Twitter, I do suspect in time we’ll see “sponsored” content on Pinterest. I just hope it’s labeled as such so I can avoid it :) LOL
Yeah, it’s not like we can even do an open letter to businesses, asking them to stay away. Then they’d just hide behind bloggers and find other tactics to “get their wares” in front of us, as I was told by another blogger. There’s already one big clothing company constantly pinning their catalog on their.
I hope you’re wrong, but I fear you may be right. Not much lately, but I used to visit some of the food brand sites and find interesting recipes there — the kind I might now pin to try later. What I don’t want to see happen is something like “repin this recipe and get a coupon for . . . “
I had the same thought, you just said it better. :-) i know for a fact thst brands have found Pinterest . One of the great things, though, is we can control what we see there. Unlike Facebook where it’s harder to ignore specific things (and people), you can be specific with which boards you follow on Pinterest… without it being a personal affront, like ignoring a friend request on Facebook. I, too, love to quiet of Pinterest and hope it doesn’t become over commercialized. It’s truly helping “the little guys”!
I agree – but hope it doesn’t ultimately turn out that way. I’m already feeling the steps toward over-promotion, though, and it’s kind of a bummer. I take comfort in Heather’s observation that perhaps Pinterest is staying on top of things. I’d love for them to protect their brand as strongly as others want to promote their own.
You’re right. There is a lot of noise out there. I see it both as a blogger and a person who uses social media personally. Maybe Pinterest will take a stand and not allowed brands to take over with sponsored pins, etc. They have room on their sites to put up ads, and they haven’t yet.
Pinterest is funded by a couple of silicone valley big wigs. If they were trying to get rich off Pinterest they surly would have already. Seems that is not the intention. Love that someone got an email asking them to reduce shameless self pinning!!! LOL!