In the spring of 2018, Pinterest hosted In the Making, a Pinterest conference for creators. In this blog post, I share who I met and what I learned about Pinterest marketing and the Pinterest platform for the future.

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If you’ve been following along, you know that I was fortunate enough to be personally invited to attend a conference hosted by Pinterest for creators. The conference was hosted on June 5, 2018 in San Francisco and, in true Pinterest fashion, it was filled with amazing craft making, popular content creators, and AMAZING FOOD. The food might have been my favorite part (beyond the amazing tidbits and helpful Pinterest staff). But the event was way more than an all-you-can-eat snackbar and carefully crafted cocktails (as if that wasn’t enough!); it was a place to ask questions, collaborate, and get clarity about this amazing platform.

Pinterest Conference: The Creators

I brought along Reina of Reina+Co and it was so fun to experience the conference with her. We were ‘fan girling’ after some of our favorite creators. I had a chance to swap Pinterest tips and strategy with Emily Henderson. She was super funny and down-to-earth.

Reina and I also loved meeting Brit Morin of Brit+CO. She was lovely, engaging, and insightful about being mindful and taking ‘life offsite’ retreats. I also found out her husband practices yoga where my mom teaches. 😉

The creator team is so clever: Look at this amazing Pinterest board sharing all the details from the event.

One of my favorite parts of the conference was the interview that Evan Sharp, one of Pinterest’s founders, did with a college student based in the midwest named Lauren, who was brought in to represent the average Pinterest user. Evan asked her how she uses Pinterest to inspire and bring unique beauty in her life. It was such a magical moment for me and a big takeaway of the event: Don’t get so lost in the content creation that you forget who you are creating for! Pinterest headquarters may be based in the Bay Area of California, which has its own unique culture, but the Pinterest staff hasn’t lost sight of their UVP (unique value proposition): inspiring ideas and bringing them to life in all corners of the world. Pinterest isn’t about a selfie and what others like—curated boards are a reflection of your interests, a mirror of what you want to achieve or actions you want to take in your life.

Changes to the Pinterest Platform

Pinterest shared with us some of the new upcoming features of Pinterest.

• Commenting will play a bigger role, with comments following pins across the platform (and later, technology, allowing people to upload images as they ‘try’ specific pins).

• Communities, now in beta, allow you to connect with other Pinterest users around a uniting subject. You can get together with wedding photographers…or queso lovers. This brings a bit more of the social angle back to Pinterest. 😉
• Better Pinterest analytics and audience insights. Some accounts can see this now, but the platform will allow you to see a combined count of impressions, close-ups, and clicks for your pins at 24 hours, 7d, and 30d intervals. You can only see the stats for the pins on your confirmed website (which can be done in the settings tab on your account).

• Also, a stronger emphasis on visual search through Pinterest’s related pin images and Pinterest lens.
• Pinterest Profiles will be more prevalent in auto-complete. Is your Pinterest profile optimized for search?

What’s next?

Pinterest is making a large effort to be transparent and helpful with creators to enable them to harness the power of Pinterest to drive traffic to their sites. If you want to follow all of the new helpful guidelines, be sure to bookmark the new resource for Pinterest creators.

Or, you can follow me on Pinterest, where I am sharing the latest Pinterest changes and tips to help creative small businesses craft traffic-generating Pinterest marketing strategies.

I’ll be featuring some more blog posts about everything I learned at the In the Making Pinterest conference, but, all in all, I was so impressed with how carefully the Pinterest staff listened to creative content creators, as they aim to create a beautiful partnership between the platform and the creators who make it an inspiring place.

I also had a chance to talk with Mohak, of Pinterest, about video. There wasn’t a huge emphasis on video at the conference, but I definitely need some more education about this, so I’m hoping we get some content guides on video pins soon!

All-in-all, it was such a fun Pinterest conference with people full of creative energy and heart!

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!