💔 Why I Broke Up With Pinterest

Amelia [00:00:02] [Music begins to play, overlapping with the intro to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Amelia [00:00:08] I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. On this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Amelia [00:00:22] Download your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and join us as we do it all off the grid [music jams and fades out].

Amelia [00:00:37] Hello, Hello and welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I run this podcast. I am the founder of a podcast studio called Softer Sounds and I love talking to ya'll [laughs heartily]. I feel like I start every episode a little awkwardly just being like, "Thanks for listening, you're the best." But I really do believe it.

Amelia [00:01:02] This show is where I get to call in a community of creators, freelancers, small business owners, and all-around awesome people who share the value of wanting to do business differently and to find success without relying on social media.

Amelia [00:01:20] So, if you're new around here, let me make sure that you know about the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit. It's a resource I've created for folks who want to get their selves or their business off social media, for folks who want to launch a business without social media, or for folks who intend to stay on social media but would like support creating new and different marketing strategies for their work. So, you can get that for free at softersounds.studio/byeig that's b-y-e-i-g. Just click the link in the show notes, put that into your browser, or if you're on YouTube, look down below and you'll find it there too.

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Amelia [00:02:16] And of course, if you have other feedback, happy to hear that too. You can send it to hi@softersounds.studio and I'll be happy to chat with you about what you enjoy about the show, things you like to hear on future episodes, or even improvements you think we can make. Hey, I'm here for it all.

Amelia [00:02:32] So, today's episode is a little bit confessional. It's definitely rooted in my values around transparency and honesty and upfront-ness about what's working for myself and my business and marketing. And it's really a callback to Season One.

Amelia [00:02:48] So, in Season One of the podcast, I did a whole episode on Pinterest with my amazing Pinterest consultant Brooke, and I did two episodes on the marketing practices that we were doing at Softer Sounds. And both times I talked about Pinterest.

Amelia [00:03:02] So, today's episode is all about Pinterest again [laugh softly], but from a very different perspective of me and Pinterest, we are done for now. We have broken up and this episode is going to be, I think, a little shorter, a little more bittersweet. And, you know, imagine that moment on, like, the reality dating show where, like, they go into the confessional and they're like, "It's just it didn't work out for us. And here's why." That's what this episode is. I'm excited to get into it.

Amelia [00:03:28] So, let's dive in to the Pinterest pool [splashing sound]. Sometimes my transitions are so weird ya'll. Thanks for sticking with me.

Amelia [00:03:38] Okay, so last year I was really into Pinterest— Pinterest for marketing my business. You can use Pinterest for all sorts of reasons, but I was into Pinterest for marketing my business. Why? Well, I was starting a business with a tiny, tiny audience and I wanted to get it in front of more people.

Amelia [00:03:56] Like, I had built an audience for myself and for my book but that audience was not an audience of people who wanted to make podcasts. So, I wanted to build an audience for my business of people who wanted to make podcasts. And to do that, I wanted to get my business in front of more people.

Amelia [00:04:11] So, I knew from my marketing background— if you've listened to this show, you know, from everything I've shared on this show, that one of the best ways to grow an audience is to create content. So, I made some great content and I needed somewhere to share it.

Amelia [00:04:25] Now, side note for lovely listeners [laughs lightly] who tuned in last week, I'm also no longer into content, so if you want to know why I'm breaking up with content marketing, listen to last week's episode, "Ten Things I Hate About Content Marketing," but this week is about Pinterest so we're going to keep the focus on Pinterest.

Amelia [00:04:41] So, at the time I was, like, launching a new business, got to grow an audience, got to nurture some trust. Great way to do that is to make some good content and share it with people who don't know me. So, I made the great content and I needed somewhere to share it.

Amelia [00:04:55] Social media was out, SEO through search engines was great, but really slow moving. And I'd heard so much about Pinterest and how maybe it could help me grow an audience, you know, in a couple months or whatnot and I wanted to try it.

Amelia [00:05:10] I was excited that it could work a little faster than SEO, but I was especially excited because of the potential of longevity for my Pinterest posts. So, coming off of social media, one of the things that was so annoying is that it's like my post would just, kind of, be disappeared after a few hours, right? Like, your posts maybe get 12 to 24 hours to surface in people's feeds and then they just live on your profile forever, but on Pinterest what I kept hearing over and over again was that your posts will keep showing up as long as people keep searching that thing.

Amelia [00:05:43] So, I was like, "Amazing. Like, I'm so sick of making content that just disappears after a day. I want to make stuff that's going to last longer so I can make less stuff over time, right?"

Amelia [00:05:54] And I not only heard that [chuckles], but I had personal experience with it. So, when I launched my book 50 Feminist Mantras, I made a few dozen pins for it, and I had this one pin that did amazing. Like, that pin somehow got launched into the stratosphere of [chuckles] pins where it still, to this day, three years later, gets a few thousand views and, like, 50 to 100 clicks a week.

Amelia [00:06:21] So, that pin is still in the Pinterest stratosphere and it's still showing up in searches and it's still working. So, I was like, "That's what I want for my business, right? Like, I want to make something that will, over time, just continue to get views and views and views."

Amelia [00:06:36] That's why I went to Pinterest. I was like, "It's going to get me in front of a new audience, got some free stuff that'll make them trust me, and then hopefully they'll just keep seeing that, come into my business ecosystem, and buy things from me." That's the dream. Like, that's what I want all the time.

Amelia [00:06:50] So, off to Pinterest I went. Like, the Snow White seven dwarves, like— [Clip of "Heigh-Ho" song plays] that was me off to Pinterest. [Chuckles lightly] I searched for pins on how to make great pins. I was very meta about it. I was like, "I'm going to go to Pinterest for people to tell me how to, like, rock this Pinterest thing."

Amelia [00:07:05] And I read a bunch of that stuff. I got a bunch of lead magnets. I did what I normally do, which is, like, let me look at how other people are doing this. Let me learn from them. And I tried to do that myself. Like, I took their advice, I modeled their behavior, and I tried to do it myself [laughs].

Amelia [00:07:18] And then, after one horrible Friday night when I was, like, on the couch trying to finish my to-do list for the week, making these pins, and hating it, I was like, "This is great, but I'm never going to do this myself, so I should hire support."

Amelia [00:07:33] You can hear all about that journey in the episode I did with Brooke in Season One. So, I hired my Pinterest consultant. I spent about $2500 on her over the course of, like, I think, four months. And then, I also spent about $750 on ads over that time— over about six months on Pinterest.

Amelia [00:07:53] Now, you may wondering, why did I do ads? I had never done paid ads on Instagram, but on Pinterest, I decided to do paid ads for a couple reasons.

Amelia [00:08:00] One is that my Pinterest consultant suggested it. She was like, "You want results in the next few months so you might want to consider ads to kind of speed up the process of getting your stuff in front of more people." And I was like, "Okay, yeah, I get a pay-to-play model. Let's go."

Amelia [00:08:15] And also Pinterest reached out to me to say that if I had a minimum ad spend, I think of $300 a month, then I would get a Pinterest small business ad manager. Like, they'd give me an ad manager that would meet with me monthly and help me optimize my ads so they'd perform better.

Amelia [00:08:32] So, I was like, "Okay, if I'm doing this, I'm going to do it." And I worked with Brooke and we went for it. We're doing daily posts, static and video posts, regularly scheduled idea pins, had all the hashtags. Brooke had a strategy, she had a beautiful Notion dashboard for me, I had the advice of my Pinterest ad manager, like, helping me run the ads on the back end, optimizing the audiences.

Amelia [00:08:54] You know, we really put in the effort. Same thing I did on social media [laughs]. Spoiler alert. And in some ways, I will say, it worked. Similar to when I was on social media, like, I got results and they were okay.

Amelia [00:09:07] So, just to walk you through some numbers, if you're like me and you're like, "Okay, Amelia, don't— don't vague post it. Tell us what you really did." I mean, I just gave you money numbers, but let's talk about, like, ad spend, impressions, engagement.

Amelia [00:09:20] So, in late 2021, like, I was playing with ads and I spent, like, in December— looks like in December of 2021, I spent $27.12 on Pinterest and I got just under 14,000 impressions and over 100 engagements. And I was like, "Cool, 20 bucks. 14,000 people. This is going to go on their feed. Awesome."

Amelia [00:09:41] So, then in the spring, after I had Brooke on and I was working with the consultant, I hit— looks like in May of 2022, I spent $300 that month and I got just under 60,000 impressions and 900 engagements. Now, the first thing I notice is, like, with impressions, I was spending ten times the money and I was not getting ten times the impressions.

Amelia [00:10:04] So, it's not a direct shift that— in engagements, it was a little more. I spent, like, just over ten times the money and I got nine times the impressions. So, like, we're more even there. But I did notice that, you know, Pinterest isn't, like, guaranteeing it's a 1-to-1 ratio, but I definitely saw that there were a lot of shifts over time.

Amelia [00:10:25] Similarly, so in June of 2022, I knocked down my ad spending. I spent $60 that month and I got 10,000 impressions and 200 engagements. So, there I think what we can see is, like, my pins were probably reaching more of the right people and getting way more engagement. My audience has narrowed and is more specific, but at the same time, in December of 2021, I spent $30 and got 14,000 impressions, now I'm spending 60 and I got 10,000.

Amelia [00:10:51] So, you know, the numbers were a little inconsistent to me over six months of spending money and experimenting with this. And really, I spent eight months overall just doing these experiments. And there are a few things I noticed. So, the one is all the impressions and engagement that I talked through.

Amelia [00:11:09] The results were inconsistent, but even more importantly [laughs lightly], it didn't translate to traffic on my site. So, if you go into the Pinterest back end and when I was on calls with my ad manager, the stats they emphasized were impressions and engagements. That's going to be your highest numbers. Occasionally then, they will talk about outbound clicks, like that's when people are actually going to my site to get the free resource that I'm promoting in the pin. And at the end of the day, that's all I care about.

Amelia [00:11:40] So, what I wanted was outbound clicks, and I was always having to, like, dig for that information. Often, even when my engagement was in the hundreds, my outbound clicks were in the single digits or teens, and this was confirmed by the traffic stats on my website.

Amelia [00:11:55] So, in all of 2022, I got just under 300 referrals from Pinterest. It's not nothing, but it wasn't that much considering I spent over three grand on a consultant and ads.

Amelia [00:12:08] So, in that time I had 300 total referrals from Pinterest. In that same year, I had almost 500 referrals from Instagram. And I am not even on Instagram [laughs], right? Like, that's the whole point is that my business is successful without Instagram. I got that just from people referring to the business on Instagram and then people realizing like, "Oh, Softer Sounds isn't here," so they have to go to the website.

Amelia [00:12:29] So, I really just noticed through all of this money spent on Pinterest that—

Amelia [00:12:36] A— Pinterest was still pointing me toward those sorts of vanity metrics of impression and engagement. So, I had to remember always like, "Okay, what actually matters to me is outbound clicks, and go look at outbound clicks."

Amelia [00:12:47] So, I got those outbound clicks. There was, like, 300 outbound clicks, right? That I paid my three grand for. Those people were just going to my website for a free resource and they didn't actually buy anything [laughs wearily].

Amelia [00:12:59] So, at the end of the day, in the eight months I was working on Pinterest, I did not have a single inquiry or purchase from a person who heard about me on Pinterest.

Amelia [00:13:08] So, my client acquisition cost [laughs lightly], you know, three grand for zero clients. Now, granted, that doesn't mean it is a failure or would always be a failure, but, for me [laughs softly], there is not a ton of extra money in my business, you know.

Amelia [00:13:22] Like, I kind of have a certain amount of money I want to spend per year experimenting with different marketing strategies. I understand that in this day and age, sometimes it takes money to make money. I'm not naive. Also, I understand lots of people don't have that money to play around with. It's part of why I'm doing this. I'm here. I did the experiment; I spent the money. I'm reporting back so that you maybe don't have to spend the money. I want to share all of that.

Amelia [00:13:46] But I think that for me, it was just, you know, I [pauses] was seeing that this wasn't working. I was not booking clients. It didn't seem like things were getting more promising over the course of these eight months I was experimenting.

Amelia [00:14:00] So, I decided at that point that I was done spending money on Pinterest. It was a bummer. Like, I'd invested this money. I'd spent the stuff and it didn't work. And honestly, it sucks when an experiment doesn't work. I wish I had $3,000 [chuckles wearily] more than I had this information that it didn't work. Although I'm happy to share it with you.

Amelia [00:14:18] Like, it was an expensive experiment for me and that was tough to swallow. But at the time I was like, "Okay, well, maybe the longevity piece will still pay off," because if you remember at the top, I was like— I was really interested in like, maybe my pins will keep showing up over a long time.

Amelia [00:14:34] So, in early 2023, I was like, "I haven't posted in six months. I'm going to go see what my stats look like." So, I went back to my stats and in January 2023, when I checked in, over the course of that month, I had 2.5 thousand impressions, just over a hundred engagements. And remember the stat that actually matters to me, six outbound clicks.

Amelia [00:14:57] So, at the end of the day [laughs], I just don't think Pinterest worked that well for me. The longevity of my posts, like, I think when I talked about it before, like, what I've learned is that I got lucky with that one book post that I said, kind of, launched into the stratosphere. That's how it feels.

Amelia [00:15:14] Like, something launched for me there. None of my other pins from that time period have any views or engagements. I mean, we're looking, like, single-digit numbers, and that's kind of what I'm seeing with the longevity of my pins at this stage as well, is that there's still some engagement. My idea pins are definitely getting the most engagement, but the longevity just isn't there.

Amelia [00:15:38] And here— mentioning idea pins, I am noticing now, as well, that Pinterest is starting to operate more and more like a social media platform. So, what I mean by that is that Pinterest— part of the reason I was so excited to go there, part of the reason it got sold to me, is Pinterest really used to operate more as a search engine, by which I mean it encouraged outbound clicks.

Amelia [00:16:01] So, people still say this. I said this last season, so I want to be like— I'm critiquing myself here [chuckles lightly], my past self. Like, it's the logic of, like, Pinterest as a search engine, not a social media platform. It is the case that people go to Pinterest to search, but what is important about a search engine is that when you get the search results, they take you somewhere else.

Amelia [00:16:23] So, Pinterest used to really encourage outbound clicks. It benefited advertisers like me because it took people from the platform to our websites and the goal was always like get them to your website and they used to encourage that.

Amelia [00:16:36] But what I noticed over the course of my, kind of, year on Pinterest is that their increased emphasis on idea pins and video on the platform is keeping people on the platform. My idea pins did then and do now consistently perform way better than any of the rest of my pins, organically at least. And they don't take anyone to my website. They don't move them off Pinterest at all.

Amelia [00:17:00] And if you've used Pinterest in the app recently, you might notice this. It looks a lot more like stories up top, like they're keeping people on the platform. They're also very product-focused, not as much resource-focused.

Amelia [00:17:14] So, product, I mean, like if you are selling a physical thing that people are shopping for, there's a lot of emphasis of that on Pinterest. Resource-focused, for me, being like trying to answer questions and get people to my free resources on my website, like they're not transitioning people off the platform in that way as well as they perhaps used to from, you know, the advertiser perspective.

Amelia [00:17:34] At the end of the day, I have started to feel just like Pinterest is another— is social media-ing me again [chuckles wearily]. Like, I've just gotten caught in the same rigged game.

Amelia [00:17:43] It's, like, pointing me toward the vanity metrics. It's turning the focus to keeping people on the platform, and it's emphasizing a pay-to-play model. Like, joke's on me [chuckles], and I am bummed [laughs]. Like— it's like a womp, womp, womp sort of moment ["womp womp womp" sound plays].

Amelia [00:18:02] But I'm going to put a big but here— insert big old but— because I do think there was a bigger issue for me on Pinterest, that was not just the platform, it was actually a strategic failure on my part.

Amelia [00:18:15] So, when I reflect back, I do think that I— there was, like, a failure in my strategy that made it not successful for me. So, let me unpack that for you quickly.

Amelia [00:18:24] Pinterest is very focused on free resources. Like, I knew that. It's focused on— it's a search engine. So, that, sort of, like, free "how to" content does really well there.

Amelia [00:18:33] So, I promoted my free resources there, the Free Podcast Launch workbook, the Free Podcast Audit workbook, and I had nurture sequences. Like, they get that, they get a nurture sequence that tries to upsell them into one of my packages, right?

Amelia [00:18:45] I'm following the formula. Lead magnet, nurture sequence, sales.

Amelia [00:18:49] However [laughs softly], this is where my strategy failure comes in. I have that great strategy, but there was a failure in it, which is that it is a huge leap from a free resource to a, at the time, $500 package.

Amelia [00:19:03] It is a huge leap, a leap that even six months of folks getting their resource and their nurture sequence and sticking around on my mailing list. Like, these folks didn't leave. I was paying attention. They stuck around for six months, but they still didn't buy anything because it was too big a leap from free to $500. That package is now over $1,000. Like, that's too big. Free to a grand is a really hard leap to make.

Amelia [00:19:28] I would reconsider Pinterest if I was selling a lower-cost course or digital product. Like, if I were selling something for me under $100, I would reconsider Pinterest. I think it's much more possible to build a sort of funnel or nurture people from free to 100 bucks than it is from free to $1,000, obviously.

Amelia [00:19:47] And this really goes back to what Pinterest is great for, right? So, Pinterest is the love of the DIYers out there. I am one of them. Folks don't go to Pinterest to get someone to do something for them. They go to get support doing it themselves.

Amelia [00:20:01] So, when we've got affordable resources for DIYing things, I think Pinterest can be great. But when what we're offering, like I am, is a more high cost done for you or done with you service, I just don't think Pinterest is the place— like that's not where we cultivate the audience for that.

Amelia [00:20:17] I actually think a podcast does a great job of that. Just shout out [giggles] if you're listening and you want support nurturing those clients that direction. So, now we've paired what I think is my critique of the platform with what I think is actually my, like, strategic failure in this moment.

Amelia [00:20:32] And I have broken up with Pinterest. We did break up, it is over, we are done [laughs]. But you know, this is not a Taylor Swift song. I won't say that we are never, ever, ever getting back together. Like, we might, one day, when I have a different sort and price point of offering to sell.

Amelia [00:20:51] So, this episode again is shared in the spirit of radical transparency and generosity. I want to amend some of the suggestions I made last season. I want to be honest about how my experiments work, and I want to model that, like, we're going to fail sometimes. It's going to happen, even to folks like myself who are out here theoretically saying they know some stuff about marketing [laughs]. I do. But that doesn't mean that everything I do is a total success or that my strategy works 100% of the time, or that I've got it all figured out.

Amelia [00:21:21] Hopefully this episode saves you $3,000 on your Pinterest strategy. Don't make my same mistakes. I'm happy to share them with you for that reason [laughs], and I hope that it helps you feel a little more emboldened to do your own experiments. Even if they fail, it's going to be okay.

Amelia [00:21:37] We can get through it. We can try different things. We can keep that creative experimental mindset that will help our businesses grow. Failure helps us grow. It's an important part of the process.

Amelia [00:21:47] So, thank you for being here. Thank you for witnessing me in this. If you love Pinterest, I love that for you. And that's it for today, friends.

Amelia [00:21:56] Thanks for tuning in to this reality TV confessional sort of episode. I'm really excited to be in Season Two. I'm really excited for the episode coming up next week, [music quietly begins to play] so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. And until then, I will see you babes off the grid.

Amelia [00:22:22] Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's softersounds dot studio slash b-y-e-i-g.

Amelia [00:22:37] This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Purple Planet and our logo is by n'atalier Studio. If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help.

Amelia [00:22:48] Find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you off the grid.