I know that I don’t usually post on blogging related material, but I’ve been doing a lot of extensive research on Pinterest lately since the algorithms have changed and I believe that I have discovered an idea that will rock your world!
The news is simple…you should be deleting your old pins on Pinterest.
9 Reasons You Should Be Deleting Your Pins
Tell Pinterest You are Popular
I think it’s pretty easy to understand that social media is all about being the most popular. The blogs on social media that are already most popular have it a lot easier. Places like Facebook and Pinterest share their posts because they ARE popular. Social media wants to be popular so it shares popular stuff. Plain and simple. But what do you do if you only have a low audience reach or get a lot of 1 repins?
You tell social media you’re popular. When I first started, I was getting horrible repin amounts. 1’s mostly. I was NOT popular in Pinterest’s eyes…at all!
In the past month, I have personally deleted a little over 10,000 pins on my account! Before that, I had tried everything to get more repins, but could not figure it out. All my friends were getting more repins than me and I felt awful.
When I began deleting pins, I started with all my own boards. I thought of it like a first impression. When a new reader comes to my Pinterest account, do I really want them wasting their time on 10,000 pins with 1 repin? Or do I want to show them ONLY the GOOD STUFF? The stuff that WON’T waste their time?
Don’t Waste Your Readers Time
Readers don’t have time to see all those garbage pins. They need and want the best and they want it now. When I started deleting my pins, I started off just deleting all the pins that had 1 repin on them. That’s it. After a couple of days, I started to notice that Pinterest was giving me 2 repins per pin generally. So, I started deleting all old pins to 3 and I started seeing 4 repins generally.
My AH-HA moment had come!
I continued deleting all my pins on my account that had less than 5 repins. Immediately, I started seeing Pinterest respond. They were giving me more repins. They were showing my stuff to other people and whereas the MOST repins I was getting before I started all this, was like 30 repins. Now, it’s closer to 100!!! I have gotten repins that are 300 and 1,000 and many in the 100’s. No longer am I getting 30’s. I’m getting 100’s. Most of my pins now get over 5 repins, even the ones that don’t do well at all.
Although I obviously can’t confirm this with Pinterest, I think there’s a correlation between what you have on your account and how much they show your pins to others, same as Facebook. In fact, the Pinterest algorithms and Facebook algorithms seem to be very similar, except for one VERY IMPORTANT detail.
You’re Pinning Too Much
If you are pinning what all the experts say to pin, that is about 60-100 a day. 80% should be others pins and 20% should be your pins, right? WRONG!
Do your research, the BEST Pinterest accounts on Pinterest, pin 10-30 pins a day. 30 pins a day AT MOST. Listen, more is NOT always better. More IS better on Facebook, but not so on Pinterest. The LESS you pin, the better. I know that sounds crazy.
Why this works…
I know what you’re thinking…if I pin less, I’ll get less traffic. That may be true for the first week of doing this, but I can tell you that afterwards, you will see such amazing results that blow everything out of the water. If you are working smart, you are being more strategic. You begin to only pin the best. NO FILLERS! Pinning random stuff all day long is like trying to throw darts in the dark. Okay, you may hit the bulls-eye, but probably not.
Being strategic in your pinning WILL get you results. And I’m not talking small results, but major ones here. My followers have gone DRASTICALLY up. I was getting about 30-50 Pinterest followers a day. Now I get anywhere from 100-200 a day. On average over the course of a month, it comes out to be 168/day. My repins are skyrocketing. Suddenly Pinterest thinks I’m popular, because what is on my boards is good stuff.
Right now, I’m personally pinning about 20 of my own stuff and about 20 of others. I’m working on getting the amount lower, but I don’t want to lose all my traffic either, so it’s a work in progress. Take it slow, but the first thing you need to realize is that on Pinterest, less is more!
Why Group Boards Are Failing
The other thing I noticed in my extensive research is that a few group boards I was on, that used to be so awesome, like the best boards ever, now stink! I wondered why….until I started seeing a ton of pins on their boards with only 1 repin each! Listen, if you own a group board on Pinterest, I’m sorry, but you need to be going in there every day and deleting the pins that don’t get at least 2 repins or more?
Sound drastic?
Maybe it is. But, if you don’t, you are basically telling Pinterest that your group board sucks, don’t put my stuff in front of people’s eyes! Since I’ve been testing this theory on my own group board, my group board repins for EVERYONE HAVE gone UP! Listen, it affects EVERYONE! So, you kind of have to choose what’s best for the entire group. It’s hard deleting other people’s pins, I get it. I cringed doing it for a long time, but now I know that I HAVE to, in order to make the board popular for everyone.
Delete Whole Boards
In deleting pins on my own boards, some of my own boards just weren’t performing. I decided it was better to delete the entire board. Yes, it’s hard to do, but I am so glad I did. Only the BEST content is in front of my audience now. Again, I’m not wasting their time with stuff they don’t want to see. As you delete an entire board, you may see your followers go down. This is okay, trust me, it’ll go up in a mega-way, so it’s okay to lose a few followers to gain a TON more.
After I deleted all my own pins on my own boards, I started going through all my group boards and deleting the pins I pinned. Anything that didn’t have at least 5 repins. Now, I do want to say that deleting anything under 5 repins may not be right for you. If all you get is 1’s, then don’t delete to 5. Just delete all the 0’s then. Whatever you are comfortable with. The way I looked at it when I first started this process, is that if I delete a 4 repins pin, it wouldn’t matter because if I went out and repinned that same pin this second, it would get 5 anyway.
When Deleting Pins You Will See Your Mistakes
Wowzer, was I ever stupid. My goal on Pinterest until now was to pin as much as I possibly could. Day and night, I was pinning. It was foolish. Most of those pins weren’t seen, weren’t liked, and I was WASTING MY TIME! Going back through every single one of those 10,000+ pins I deleted, forced me to start seeing patterns. Good AND bad. I saw the bad patterns, the bad posts that was a waste, and I saw the good things that I didn’t even expect. I learned that my most popular board wasn’t actually my most popular board and that I have two other MORE popular boards than that!
So now, I am ONLY pinning to those popular boards each day. Nothing else. Although I personally LOVE recipes, my audience doesn’t. So, I’m not pinning any recipes. I’m pinning the things they want to see, and I never would have known, had I not gone back through and actually looked at the results! I will also say that in my Pinterest analytics, they say that certain things are popular on my site, but, it turned out that those analytics are completely off. I’m sorry. They totally were! Now that I’m pinning what I say is popular and what I’ve seen, it’s doing a lot better. It just goes to show you, that a computer cannot replace a real live person.
When Deleting Pins You Will See Others Mistakes
It stands to reason while you are in there deleting, you will also see others mistakes. You will begin to see what works and what doesn’t. What’s hot and what’s not. Why things don’t work and the ones that do, you’ll see why. You’ll see it all as you are going through those pins. This is extremely helpful because you can then apply those principles to your own strategy. What I thought was working for me, wasn’t working near as much as my new strategy, and what I thought wasn’t working, surprisingly was. It just needed a bigger push. Since then, I have pushed it more and am seeing amazing results!
Don’t Delete Sponsored Posts Pins
The one thing I didn’t delete was sponsored post pins. I felt personally like they paid for me to promote it, I did, and I will leave it. Even if it’s 0 or 1 repins, I was paid to do a job and so I left those alone.
Everything is The Same!
There is nothing new under the sun, the Bible says. Boy is that true! Another reason why deleting your pins is a great idea is because you will see so much repetitiveness. I had a few article titles that I had planned on doing and once I saw how those same titles were plastered all over Pinterest, I decided to scrap them. They may be great titles, but I am a person ALL ABOUT BEING DIFFERENT. I do NOT want to be like anyone else. God made me completely unique. He made me, me, and you, you. While it’s great to have stuff in common, I’m not you and you’re not me.
This caused me to be more creative in my titles for my posts. I took some time and really thought about things and it gave me the encouragement and push I needed to be different and to come up with some unique posts that are not plastered everywhere online already. Not that I’m copying those titles, but that if they are already everywhere, what’s the point? Yeah, it’s hard to be different, and when you are, you’re not different for long, because then everyone just copies you, but at least you are doing your best to be YOU. And THAT is what blogging is about. It’s about YOU. Your readers may come for a title, but they STAY for you!
It Acts As a Buffer
As I was deleting pins, it was very mind-numbing work. It was SOOO boring. Like stuffing envelopes when I first got into my banking career years ago. But because you are spending so much time to delete, it also acts as a buffer on you. When you go to pin something, you will VERY QUICKLY remember that you just spent weeks deleting pins and how you DON’T want to have to do that all over again. Therefore, you will stop yourself from over-pinning. I cannot stress enough how IMPORTANT deleting your pins is, and once you do, it will become hard for you to go back to pinning 60-100 a day, knowing that you’re just going to have to go in there and delete again.
So, how do you delete?
Thankfully, there are some new tools available.
The first is directly through Pinterest
They have a new feature called “move pins,” where you can go in and move pins from board to board. In that section, you can also delete your pins in bulk, up to 50 at a time. Simply select each pin you want to delete as you go. When you reach 50 pins, it’ll pop up a message to tell you, then delete them. After you delete, you’ll want to scroll back up and find your place again to continue.
This is great. However, after your pins are all deleted, you will want to maintain deleting pins. I have seen that pins can go up to 3-4 days old and THEN go viral, so I personally wait 7 days before deleting pins. Every few days, I go back through my pins and MANUALLY one by one (boringly so) delete anything under 5 repins. Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but I’m serious about blogging and I know it’s worth it.
One thing that you should know about Pinterest is that they consider it “spammy” if you pin the same pin to multiple boards at the same time. In my picture above you see that I don’t always obey that rule, especially when I’m promoting Frugal Friday. So far, I’ve never had a problem and I do try to keep it at a minimum, but I would never encourage anyone else to do that because Pinterest has stated they find it spammy.
The second way to delete is through Board Booster
I love Board Booster. Seriously! If you haven’t used them yet, you are really missing out. You can check out a great tutorial here of how to set up pins to automatically run and work for YOU. It’s called looping. You set it up one time and you’re basically done.
I also like to use their really cool tracking system to delete pins. It just makes things SOOO much easier, and I talked to the creator of Board Booster and he might just be implementing an easier way to delete them for us! But, in the meantime, this is how I do it.
In the picture below, you can see there are two repins with less than 5. Oddly enough, both are at 0. When I went to one of them, the repin amount was 9. So, it must just have not pulled correctly. The other one was 3, so I did manually delete it because it was under my personal 5 repin rule.
As you are going through your boards and deleting, you will quickly see the posts that each board tends to like a lot. Each board has a different audience and so each board will like different pins better. As I was going through them, I was writing down which pins each board likes and I set up those pins on those boards to automatically post once a month via the looping feature. This will help me pin only what they want to see and get what they want to see in front of their eyes.
If you haven’t yet began to delete your pins, my challenge to you is to delete 100 of them and see how it goes. See what happens as you begin to pin more in the next few days. Do you see more repins? How about when you delete another 100 in a few days?
What do you think? Are you ready to delete your pins? Have you ever deleted pins in bulk like this?