I got an email from Pinterest a while ago. I tend to pay attention to those. Pinterest announces a new metric they implemented designed basically to help people like us. Yay! Something for the bloggers, not the other people! If you didn’t get the email, here’s a screenshot:
First of all, I found the new feature only shows up in my phone app (IOS), not in the browser. So if you have the IOS app, you might see this:
See the three bars in the bottom right corner with the number? On some of your pins, this will replace the repin number. I personally find this new method much more helpful, and here’s why: if my repin count is less than a hundred, it means nothing to me. Those repins are most likely a combination of me repinning the pin myself, and other bloggers doing it via share threads. Inorganic engagement.
Even if the engagement is organic, I don’t really care that much about repin rate. I care about click-throughs, and that is what the new metric is measuring for me. The number you see next to the three vertical bars measures engagement, and what’s even better, it measures it for that specific pin. So the “dealing with the mean people” pin is one that I pinned from my blog. If other people pinned it directly from my blog as well, those pins will have a different number.
If you still care about your repins, you can see how many boards the pin has been saved to by clicking on the pin. I was promised in the email/web page that clicking on the icon would give me more statistical information on the pin. I haven’t seen that yet.
You can, at least, see the difference between repins and total engagement.
So how does this affect my traffic, you ask? Why should I care? Because, as a good blogger you should be making multiple pins for each post. Those pins should have different titles and designs, even if they differ slightly from your blog post titles. What this new metric is going to tell you is which of your multiple pins are performing best for a post. For example. I posted a screenshot of my “dealing with the mean people” pin (my actual blog title for that is “how to respond when people mistreat you”). Below is another pin for the same post:
Can you see how the engagement level is around ten times as much for the previous pin? So now you know which pins you should focus on during your repin routine. I would put the ones with the highest engagement in threads as well.
Before the new metric, you’re somewhat guessing which pins to focus your attention on. You’ll have some idea from your blog stats, but you can get real specific and focused by using the numbers from your pins. It’s possible you can even detect patterns about how some pins tend to do better than others … but I’m not sure if THAT is possible. Who knows, with these pinners!
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