Thursday Press #100: what do hashtags & chainsaws have in common?
[5 OCT 2023] Scary bad Pinterest advice to watch out for
“I guess I'll take on this chainsaw-wielding murderer on my own”
^^ That was the lesson I learned after going to my first and only haunted house with my mother.
To set the scene, this was an impromptu, unofficial haunted "house" (trailer) in the middle of our rural North Carolina town that one of our cousins dragged us to.
I love spooky season and giving myself a good fright with a scary movie or two, but in-person experiences aren't my preferred festive activity.
But I was going with my mom! What could go wrong?
Narrator: Plenty could go wrong…
We had stepped out of the trailer and the exit was in sight when all of a sudden a chainsaw buzzed to life behind us.
Classic when-you-least-expect-it jump scare.
And my mom jumped. She jumped so much she dropped my hand and SPRINTED to the exit, leaving her 15-year-old daughter alone with the chainsaw operator.
Although we've been able to laugh about it plenty, my mom definitely doesn't make the "will protect me in haunted houses" list.
See, when I do decide to partake in some haunted happenings, I have a few very specific criteria…
Two years after the Chainsaw Incident™️, my best friend Jessica and I were taking advantage of our new driver's licenses and hitting up Busch Gardens Howl-O-Scream for a night of frights.
As two teenage girls, we made excellent targets for the talented actors, and that's when I enacted plan SEAL.
(Okay I didn't actually call it that, but it sounds cooler, doesn't it?)
Where we lived had one of the highest concentrations of military bases in the US, which meant there were plennnnnty of young military guys looking to prove their bravado. 🙄
Naturally, we spotted two Navy guys in line for the haunted house with their girlfriends, made some small talk, and BAM our vulnerable group of two turned into a formidable group of 6.
I never knew their names, but those guys were our trusted guides through the maze of ghouls and gore (and they didn't run away, MOM…)
When it comes to the online business & marketing world, there are lots of spooky myths, frightening misconceptions, and scare tactics out there.
That's why you need to find your own Navy-SEAL-level trusted guide to help you navigate through them!
Lucky for you, that's exactly what I'm here for.
It's the last class of our Pinterest 101 series, and before I send you off into the world, I wanted to make sure you knew what not to do in addition to the recommended best practices.
If you wanna catch up on the rest of the series, here ya go:
Week 0: Why Pinterest
Week 3: How to Craft Effective Pins
BELOW THE FOLD
Nothing gets my blood boiling more than seeing "experts" promote blatantly false information online and building a platform off of it.
The latest offender? Every Instagram growth coach telling you to stop using hashtags and start using keywords.
I'm sorry, can you hear my eyes rolling across the world???
Us Pinterest marketers have been around the block once or twice with this whole debate, and as someone who is quite familiar with Instagram personally, it's not true.
Hashtags work as long as they are relevant to your content.
Keywords work as long as they are relevant to your content.
Posting a big long list of "keywords" at the end of your IG caption is ICKY.
It's icky on Pinterest, too, and is likely to be seen as spammy because you're "keyword stuffing" instead of naturally using keywords throughout your content
Here's the thing, bestie, SEO isn't about helping YOU grow. It's about helping algorithmic platforms (aka robots) understand your content so it can give it to the people who are looking for it.
You can't "hack" your way around SEO and get better results, the algorithms are too smart for that now.
That's why yes, keywords can be important on Instagram, but if they're relevant to your content, hopefully, you would've already used them in the caption and don't need to stuff a bunch of extra ones in at the end.
The same goes for Pinterest.
You can stuff as many keywords into that description as you like, but if it doesn't actually match up to the content you're pinning, it isn't going to do much.
And as for hashtags on Pinterest, I don't bother.
Yes, they are somewhat functional, but if you click on them, it just takes you to the search result for that keyword. If your hashtag is multiple words, it searches for it all smushed together into one word, so it's not even accurately representing the phrase you're using.
Just take a look at the difference in search results between “instagram growth” and #instagramgrowth…
The search results for the #instagramgrowth hashtag are TOTALLY different from the “Instagram growth” keyword search, and they're not even all relevant!
Even more importantly, Pinterest users don't use hashtags as a way to find content, so why are you?
Ugh. I'm wayyyy too fired up rn and this is just one topic...
I really appreciate you giving me the space to share and rant about some pretty ill-informed practices in the Pinterest marketing space, friend. 🫶
There are (unfortunately) a lot more that I see quite frequently, so I rounded up the 6 most common ones in a blog for you!
Outdated Pinterest Marketing Tactics to Avoid in 2023
Thank you SO much for joining me on this little mini-series over the past 4 weeks.
I've had the most fun putting on my teacher hat and sharing the core foundations of Pinterest marketing!! Wanna share some teacher feedback? I'm happy to hear it 😉
Heading into October (my favorite month of all 😍), we'll be back to business as usual. If there's anything specific you'd like to see me cover, please let me know!!