With the recent Pinterest best practices changes, they have highlighted that the first five pins of the day are important. In this blog post, I’m sharing the details of this new strategy and what you need to do to optimize your Pinterest pins for traffic.

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If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been to Pinterest headquarters twice to talk to Pinterest employees about best practices for business. One of the more recent changes to Pinterest has been the focus on the first five pins of the day. Among the other changes, which seem similar to their best practices in the past, this one stood out and created a lot of confusion with Pinterest strategists. Let’s talk about what it means.

What You Need to Know About the First Five Pins of the Day on Pinterest

First of all, what does Pinterest actually say in the best practices guide for 2018? They tell us,

The first 5 Pins you save each day will be prioritized for distribution. Save to the most relevant board first. It’s okay to save a Pin to multiple boards, but save to the most relevant one first—that Pin will get distribution priority. Saving to irrelevant boards won’t help and may hurt the distribution of your Pins.

Did you find that quote cryptic? Why does this news have Pinterest marketers worrying so much? I, for one, didn’t panic, but we did get some clarity when Alisa Meredith of Tailwind interviewed Sarah Hoople Shere of Pinterest. The first five pins of the day refers to the new following tab on Pinterest. Your first five pins according to the UTC at midnight time zone will be shown in the following tab (to discover your time zone in relation to the UTC time zone at midnight, Google comes in handy). It’s obvious, that to create a following tab, Pinterest can’t show every pin you pin over the course of a day. That’s part of the reason why they switched to a smart feed years ago—there’s just too much volume. Pinterest is going to show and recommend your first five pins of the day to make sure that the following tab isn’t dominated by one happy pinner’s content. 😉

So, should you completely ignore this a strategy? No, there are a few things I’d recommend doing to both have a robust Pinterest strategy for driving traffic to your site, but also, not overly worry about the effects of the new changes.

(UPDATE: They later removed the ‘5 pin rule’ from the Best Practice Guide, but the advice here still stands about consistently pinning.)

The first step is to explore when UTC at midnight relates to your time zone. For me, it is 5pm PST. So, when I have fresh content (I post every Monday), I schedule that content to first go live sometime after 5:01. I want to make sure my freshest content is the first pin of the day. I utilize Tailwind, a Pinterest and Instagram scheduler I use every day to make this easy.

Using Tailwind’s interval scheduling feature, I can choose what time I want that pin to go live. (Want more Tailwind tips and tutorials? I’ve got loads here and also a $15 off Tailwind affiliate link  if you are ready to get started).

Will my pins be seen if they aren’t the first five pins of the day?

Of course, this is the biggest concern of Pinterest strategists. If you continue to use the best practices for succeeding on Pinterest, your pins with optimal images and keywords will continue to be seen on Pinterest as a search result. Don’t give up on all of your efforts and you’ll be just fine! Keep pinning consistently, create great content, and your efforts will be rewarded.

Are you new to Pinterest and want more tips to get started? See my introductory post Getting Started on Pinterest and don’t forget to sign up for my email newsletter below. You’ll receive my FREE Pinterest Start-up Guide for your creative small business where I give easy actionable steps to getting started on Pinterest!

 

If you enjoyed that, I’d love for you to follow me on Pinterest and don’t forget to pin it!