Pinterest has evolved quite a bit from its early days. and has matured like any proper social media platform does. Now it offers analytics for business accounts (all you need to do is verify your site with Pinterest), advertising, and has an algorithm for the pin feed called a Smart Feed.

The Smart Feed algorithm controls the pins you see in your feed, and removes a lot of the timing aspect from your Pinterest strategy because the goal of the algorithm is to present content to you that you (theoretically) enjoy seeing and pinning based on your previous Pinterest behavior (and even if you aren’t following those accounts), whereas before your Pinterest feed was more of a reverse chronologically-ordered timeline of pins from people you followed. Whenever you logged on was the biggest indicator of what content you would be shown.

A few of the Pinterest Best Practices that existed from Pinterest’s early days still remain while some other ones have evolved because Pinterest has evolved. Here are 8 tactics to employ on Pinterest right now.

8 Pinterest Tips for Better Account Growth

• Check your Pin Sources Yes, Pinterest is a very *visual* platform, but a good picture only goes so far if there isn’t a functional, and with a correct link behind it. Before you repin an existing pin to one of your boards, click on it and see where it takes you. Is the site still operational? Is it the correct site? Are you getting a 404 error or notice that the product is no longer available? These are the things you are looking for before you repin.
• Optimize your Pin Descriptions Incorporating a fair amount of text (a couple sentence at least) and relevant keywords will improve the chances of your pin being discovered in searches on Pinterest. And more people finding your pins means a better chance for repins and more followers!
• Optimize your Pin Boards (Title & Description) Optimizing your Pinterest board titles and descriptions can no only help your content to surface within Pinterest search, but it can help your content to surface in Google search results, too. Yep, that’s right – Pinterest boards show up in Google search engine results!
• Actively Pin on Pinterest One element of the Smart Feed relates to the time you, yourself, spend on Pinterest. Pinterest doesn’t want people to “pin and run”, so it pays attention to users who are active on the platform, scrolling through their feed and repinning existing pins to their boards.
• Pin your Promotional Content More than Once You can do this manually or with 3rd party tools, but the big takeaway here is that you should definitely pin the same post, page or product more than 1 time. It could be pinned to additional boards, or it could mean pinning it to the same board.
• Wisely Select Board Covers Because Pinterest is visual, you want to be sure to put your best foot forward on your profile page. Without setting a board cover, whatever your most recent pin to that board is what will show first/as the lead image on the board cover. Choose the most visually appealing pin image from that board to serve as your board cover. You can set or edit your Pinterest board cover when you click to edit your board.
• Adjust your Boards’ Positioning as Needed Pinterest makes it easy to drag and drop your boards to different positions on your profile page. Different seasons usually mean different boards make more sense to ‘lead off’ your profile page. Remember, most people will only see the top 4 or 5 boards (depending on device) without scrolling. So you want to make sure a new visitor to your profile is wowed from second 1.
• Create Multiple Boards, Each with a Clear Purpose First, you can’t be all promotional all of the time, so you really do need more boards besides just those that are all about your awesomeness. Second, since optimization of pins and boards is so vital (As mentioned above, Pinterest boards can and do surface in Google search results if you do it right!), it’s going to be a lot easier to optimize boards individually for shoes, jewelry, handbags, and clothes instead of putting all of those on 1 board and trying to craft a strong, well-performing board title and description. 

Just like with any other social media platform, it’s about understanding how the platforms works and platform-specific best practices in order to be successful at it. With these 8 Pinterest tips, you’ll be on your way to pinning success.