Today’s podcast is going to be all about how to use hashtags on Pinterest. I been fielding a ton of questions about hashtags over the last year. Some of you are still confused about how they work and some of you are just pretending they don’t exist because that feels easier.
Smart Fun DIY
I have Jennifer Priest of the craft blog Smart Fun DIY on the podcast with me today, who I met briefly at Social Media Marketing last year. I also recently heard her talking about hashtags on Leslie Samuel’s podcast.
Jennifer claims to be the least tech-savvy person in blog land. She started out as a crafter and taught scrapbooking classes. She entered the world of email marketing in 2001 when she started selling products on eBay.
In 2007, she started her blog and really dove into learning and testing mode. In 2009, she landed her first social media strategy consulting job. Currently she provides social media strategy services for craft/handmade companies in addition to blogging.
She started taking Pinterest seriously in 2015. Prior to that, she wasn’t using it as a marketing tool.
Jennifer got really excited about hashtags when she was doing some research and experimentation on the results that her clients were getting. Hashtags seemed to act like a really powerful SEO-type signal, informing Pinterest of what type of content is being shared and where the content should be shared.
How to Use Hashtags on Pinterest: Q & A
How many hashtags should you use and where should you use them?
UPDATED NOVEMBER 2019: In the podcast, Jennifer mentions that her rule of thumb is to add as many relevant hashtags as you can (up to 20). While that was a best practice at the time, current best practice is now to add a few relevant hashtags to your Pin descriptions. Focus on quality over quantity. While Pinterest doesn’t limit the number of hashtags on a Pin, descriptions that feel spammy will do little to add to the Pinner’s user experience. Less is more! Just ask Pinterest.
You do have a 500 character limit in your Pinterest description, so you can’t go too crazy. Generate a set of keywords you can use as hashtags.
Always put hashtags at the end of the pin description. Users are accustomed to reading the description and then seeing the hashtags at the end. Your description should be easy to read.
We recommend using a branded hashtag (for me it’s #simplepinpodcast) at the beginning of your hashtag list so that people can click on it and see all of the pins you’ve posted on Pinterest. It’s a great way to get more exposure.
You can use hashtags in board names as well. Jennifer hasn’t been able to replicate this recently but what she discovered early in the game was that putting hashtags in board names boosted the performance of those boards in searches.
Go ahead and test out using one relevant hashtag at the end of your board name!
Related: How to Clean Up Pinterest Boards
How specific do our hashtags need to be?
Jennifer’s best advise is to use a mix of broad and specific hashtags. The broad hashtags will help you show up in the search feed and will show up chronologically. Using specific hashtags will help you show up when someone searches for something specific. For example, dinner recipes could serve as a broader hashtag while chicken and rice could be used as a more fine-tuned hashtag.
Use Pinterest to discover what keyword people search for to f...