What is Smart Feed?

In early fall 2014, Pinterest introduced the Smart Feed. It’s designed to create a smarter feed for the user based on what they “care about” and search for. Basically, it went from a chronological feed to an interest/search based feed. Users were no longer seeing random pictures of cats or sketchy pictures pop in their feed as they scrolled but instead related items to recent searches. The bummer part is that some of us liked those cat pictures and might want them back.

The Smart Feed generator now determines when your pin goes out based on three things:

• Mixing different pins together
• Quality of pins (they select when they release the pin)
• Putting them into a following, related and interest pool.

This has created a drop in page views for brands and businesses using Pinterest to grow their accounts. Some have seen a drop in recently pinned content but a huge jump in repins coming from older pins. It’s been frustrating but it’s all about how you play the game.

Three things remain important:

• Quality images.
• Awesome pin descriptions that encourage pinners to pin.
• Consistent pinning to contribute to the Pinterest community.

We have embraced these changes and are working hard to grow Pinterest follower numbers and drive traffic back to our clients’ websites.