You might be wondering if hashtags should be part of your Pinterest marketing. The answer might surprise you about hashtags on Pinterest. Here’s what’s changed and how you can stand out on Pinterest in 2018!
Recently you may have logged onto Pinterest and something just didn’t seem right time. Let’s be honest it’s happens time and time again, different features have changed on the Pinterest platform. Listening to online circles, I am sensing a little bit of frustration but with the latest change is a big change.
You may have noticed it when you were looking in your search bar. You may have noticed it in the pin descriptions. Something kind of shouting out at you in a different color. Blue, where did that come from? If you know what I’m talking about then you’re probably just like me and extremely surprised with this latest update to the Pinterest platform is update of Pinterest officials saying that they now want you to use hashtags on Pinterest.
WHAT??? Did you hear that correctly. Hashtags are now on Pinterest?
How many times have we heard from Pinterest and Pinterest Marketers, don’t use hashtags. They mentioned that you don’t need them because the words themselves are searchable. You’ve most likely heard this since it started right? A lot of us were accidentally using them there and would go in and get rid of them since we were used to using hashtags on Twitter and on Instagram. And at the times even on Facebook, which if you’ve noticed that strategy is kind of gone away there.
But now Pinterest the saying come on back, we want you to use hashtags. What I’m about to tell you in this article is all my opinion. I have not been told by anyone. I have not have access to secret data but my instinct is what I’m going to share with you.
Plus Pinterest added them to their business website policy. Take a look here
Using Hashtags on Pinterest
This gut feeling is that Pinterest spends a lot of time trying to keep us on their platform.
At first it was a little related box to the right side and then came related pens below. The Pinterest engineers added interest for you to follow and the little tabs for you to click on at the top of the Pinterest interface.
You know what? The more people I talk to the more people I hear telling me they aren’t going up there and clicking on the icons at the top. The clickable buttons are based on the categories and key terms on Pinterest, so my instinct again, my total opinion, is that they tweaked the engineering and coding behind these search tools to simply add on the ability to make the word highlighted and clickable.
Full disclosure, this is my opinion I don’t know that it’s for sure but it sure acts the same way. I think if we can pause we could wrap our heads around that concept, it makes a whole lot more sense
Our society has a very short term attention span. We are very clickable. We want things instantly. I feel that by adding hashtags into the Pinterest platform, they have now given the ability for their Pinterest users to very quickly nice down into what they’re looking for by simply clicking on a hashtag.
Pinterest doesn’t know what you were looking for in that low fat zucchini bread recipe.
- Were you looking for a bread recipe?
- Were you looking for zucchini?
- Were you looking for low-fat recipes?
There’s a lot of different terms to be looking for, so by giving hashtag they can quickly niche down into what would probably be the most successful at serving you exactly what you want.
Related pins is now the key to Pinterest search. They key is for you to be the answer in their search. We want your boards and pins to be in the related pins. We want you to be a part of the search when they type in in recipes or type in holiday fashion.
So how do we do that moving forward with hashtags?
Strategies for Hashtags on Pinterest
My initial instinct is to tell you stick with what already is working well with your pin descriptions. When offering advice for pin description, I like to tell people to use it like a conversation with your very best friend that you don’t want them to miss it’s a sentence or two with a hyper focused description.
If it’s about food you have the word recipe and the main star ingredient in that description
If it’s about a clothing line… is it a shirt? Is it part of holiday fashion or fall fashion?
Those are key terms that you should be using in your pin description. Pinners will not find you unless you give them the words and the image that performs well.
What I want you to do is think broad with your first hashtag. Then I want you to think specific with your next hashtag. What is your main keyword for the post? Use it for this specific hashtag.
Now keep in mind the more hashtags you use, it’s still going to look spammy. None of us are used to Pinterest hashtags, they will look a bit out of place to us right now. I think over time as pinners we will get used to it. But right now it still feels very very wrong to me is a Pinterest marketer, as a blogger, and an active user.
I can only imagine what it feels like when average pinners as they see hashtags on Pinterest. It’s going to take time.
Popular Hashtags on Pinterest
With your broad hashtags that are popular, these are more you trying to teach Pinterest
- who you are
- what you are
- what your about
That’s where you start looking at the categories that you’re already using to describe your accounts. Then breaking them down a little bit. The more you research, the more you’re going to know what’s more popular on Pinterest with pinners. You will have a higher success rate if you type in the search term in your research and observer from left to right Pinterest shows you what’s most popular at the current moment. So follow trends on Pinterest. They just released a new article about November and Holidays. Follow those and use terms that Pinterest is already telling you that are popular.
There are tools that you can use like Ahalogy Muse that can even share more data to that information you can also use Tailwinds Seasonal Trend Videos that you can watch.
Now when we’re talking about your specific hashtag, this is something that you’re looking for to stand out on Pinterest, you could do one or two and there’s two different reasons why. The first one would be to be hyper focused maybe you are paleo maybe you are a do-it-yourselfer and you’re using only a specific product all the time that’s where you’re using those terms if you’re focusing stem activities for kids are always using that
Using Hashtags to Market your Branding on Pinterest
The other hashtag I recommend is going to be based on your marketing strategy for you. For an example, I want it to be a very specific hashtag that only you are going to be using. Using this hashtag on Pinterest will pull you into all the rest of your content if they click on this term. If it were for me right now I use Pinchat, that’s part of our Facebook group, it’s part of my marketing strategy, so if I’m pinning about Pinterest I’m going to use the term Pinchat and anytime somebody clicks on that they’re going to see all my other pins about pinchat. Switch it around my course is called pinsmart. Anytime I use pinsmart it would be when it’s about my course or maybe a review of my course or testimonial article.
My book 100 Fun and Easy Learning Games for Kids not quite a hashtag right we use #100learninggames as our hashtag. It’s still a very long one and no one’s going to naturally use that one so that means if I use that hashtag on any article that’s been written about my book, guest posts about my books and reviews and I use that hashtag that means when they click on that they’re going to see all of those reviews at once. That’s marketing gold!!!
With current pinterest marketing strategies, my hope would be if they typed it at the top they would have seen it before and I think they were seeing some of it but not necessarily all of it.
I think this is where the push came from..
The bottom line is that this was brands and Official Pinterest Marketing Partners are pushing Pinterest to be help them be more accountable for their marketing campaigns. As influencers and business owners, you and I both been a part of campaigns where we were required to use a hashtag on Pinterest. Sometimes it was useful but sometimes it was not always reliable.
I also think this was like the straw that broke the camel’s back of we’ve got to do it now is more and more Pinterest is relying on their marketers when their business partners and in order to have a successful advertising agency you have to have the ability to track what’s going on in one of those. That can be through hashtags.
Brands Marketing on Pinterest are asking
- are people talking about me
- am I having an effect of reach
- am I getting the most Impressions
All those things are available in your business analytics if you dig around as well but this is just one more building to build up your marketing campaign data
As a Pinterest account user, this is what I want you to be doing as well with your hashtags. These are places and ways to touch points with potential new clients, new customers, new consumers.
Touch Points to Connect On Pinterest
- Repinning content from these target users
- Leaving a comment about what they’ve pinned
- Tweeting out a pin that they’ve made and tagging them
There are so many different ways that you can highlight how awesome someone is by still talking about your content, so start thinking strategically how you’re going to do that with Pinterest Marketing.
How to Know Which Hashtags on Pinterest
Start digging around just like we would on Instagram of finding out what hashtags are being used are popular, which are not being used enough and see where you can fit in. I think Tailwinds hashtag tool for Instagram is also going to be a beneficial tool for you on Pinterest.
You don’t always want to use the super popular ones because you’re not going to get seen as easily. I do think sometimes, especially on Pinterest, believe that we’re also teaching them this is what I’m about
- I’m about recipes
- I’m about Fitness
- I’m about Fashion
- I’m about Business
We still need to teach Pinterest so they will serve our pins when they’re doing the pics for you pins and related pins and you might like this pain we want to be who Pinterest thinks as the expert in the more we tell them we are the more they’ll begin to write this as that in their search engine tools.
This is the very beginning of hashtags on Pinterest. We’re all just starting to open that can of worms and see what we can do with it. I hope you’ll follow along with me and as I get more data I’m going to be sharing it with you. We’re going to talk about it in the PinChat community.
If you have a case study you’d like to share with us, please leave it in the comments below or you can email me at [email protected] or you can come on over and share if you are pinchat Facebook group.
We can talk case studies over there what you’re seeing with hashtags I think we’re all going to see things at different times and I love being able to build upon one another together as we figure out our hashtag strategy on Pinterest.
Here is some helpful insight from Pinterest about using hashtags:
“When inserting a hashtag, we recommend you be specific and descriptive. Use words or phrases that describe the content in the Pin – we recommend you add no more than 20 hashtags per Pin. It’s best to be objective and use hashtags that make sense and are relevant to the Pin. Depending on your Pin, consider using hashtags that are timely (e.g. #oscars, #backtoschool, #halloween) and/or hashtags for evergreen content that works well on Pinterest (e.g. #mealplanning, #hairgoals, #homedecor). This is to help make it easier to for users to filter and find relevant content they are interested in.”
Source https://help.pinterest.com/…/hashtags-pinterest-partners and also this: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/hashtags-pinterest
Pinterest is always changing and adapting the needs of it’s users to have the best experience possible. Looks like hashtags are here to stay! Let’s use them effectively to drive traffic to our website based on data drive pins.
To learn more about how you can learn to drive traffic, revenue, subscribers as you build your online community I invite you to sign up for my 5 DAY PINSMART CHALLENGE. Click here to read more about how to join this MINI SERIES.
