337 | This Pinterest Pin Is 12 Years Old and Still Bringing Me Clients

You're pouring hours into content that vanishes in a day, and it's exhausting. In this episode, Jen breaks down why Pinterest works completely differently than every other platform you're posting on, and why a single pin she made in 2014 is still sending her traffic almost 12 years later.

In this episode:

• Why Pinterest is a search engine, not social media, and what that means for how long your content actually works
• The real lifespan of an Instagram story, feed post, carousel, and reel compared to a Pinterest pin
• Pinterest's audience numbers and why 97% of searches are unbranded, wide open territory for new discovery
• What Jen's own analytics show when she compares Pinterest traffic to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube combined
• Why the first few months on Pinterest feel quiet, and why that's exactly when most people quit right before it pays off
• The simple batching system that gets a pin out every day without Jen doing daily work

ALL LINKS MENTIONED: https://jenvazquez.com/how-long-do-pinterest-pins-last/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I have a pin I made almost 12 years ago, and it's sitting in my top 10 pins this month, still sending people to my site. Hold that thought. I am gonna show you in just a second. Welcome back to Marketing Strategy Academy podcast, where we help female entrepreneurs go from marketing overwhelm to an easy streamlined strategy and system that includes Pinterest and repurposing content to grow their businesses when they have very little time. I'm your host, Jen Vasquez. Let's jump right into it. Here's the shift that changes everything. Pinterest is, as you know by now, watching my videos, it's a search engine. It is not a social feed. And it works more like Google or YouTube than Instagram. On social, content tends to die fast, so you feed it constantly on a search platform. Your content keeps getting found for as long as people are searching. And before people type anything in the comments, yes, you still want a pin going out every single day. The daily part is your pins, not you doing that work daily. Your pins post daily, but you don't have to. An Instagram story lasts about a day. A feed photo on Instagram lasts about 19 to 20 hours, and a carousel will last up to about a month. Even a reel, which is going to be your longest living format, it tends to top out, and this is current statistics, it tends to top out around two to two and a half months, and then it's gone. So the real comparison isn't hours versus days, it's months at best versus years and years of Pinterest pins. And this isn't just my account. And the audience is exploding. Pinterest is now somewhere between 537 and 619 million monthly active users, driven by fast international and Gen Z growth. But the real story is intent. And about 80% of the weekly pinners make purchases directly through the app. Here's what that looks like for me. In this report, Pinterest sent more traffic than my Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube combined. Even though I only post about three reels a week and I batch Pinterest with far less ongoing effort. And honestly, that direct traffic chunk is almost certainly hiding even more Pinterest clicks because the app often strips its referrer. So this is my floor, not my ceiling. And when you're in the Google Analytics area, you want to look for all versions of Pinterest. So it could be Pinterest for mobile, it could be Pinterest for another country. There's a variety. So make sure you add up all those Pinterests. Here's the part nobody warns you about. Pinterest is front-loaded. The setup and the optimization take real work up front, and it's slow to pay at first. Most pins take at least three months just to get indexed and pushed to the right people. So week one will look quiet. People panic and they decide it doesn't work because they want that instant feedback, right? That they get from Instagram. And they tend to quit right before it's about to pay off for them. The mindset that fixes this is blogging energy. Nobody loves the setup, and everybody loves the traffic. You're building an asset, not chasing a feed. If you want the exact setup checklist that I use, so your foundation is right from day one. It's absolutely free. In my visibility vault, go grab the Pinterest for service providers checklist. The link is learn.genvasque.com/slash resources and it'll be down in the resources. So here's the actual system. You get pens going out every single day, but you do the work in one focused batch instead of daily work. In practice, a service provider can post just one pin a day and still win. You sit down once a week or even once a month once you have that system down and line up all those pins all at once. I personally use Tailwind, which is a Pinterest-approved scheduler, to set it and forget it. Load those pins, pick your dates, and it posts them for you while you're off living your life. And you're not making brand new content for this. You're repurposing what you already created: blog posts, videos, photos into fresh pins that send people back to your site. The hardest part is that front-loaded setup. And that's exactly where most people get stuck. So I'm running a live Pinterest visibility sprint where we are gonna do it together. It's a two-hour live workshop type session, and we set up your foundation and your first batch of pins so Pinterest can actually start compounding for you instead of you guessing alone. Spots are limited, so save your seat at learn.genvasque.com slash sprint, and of course that link will be in the description. Let's bring it back to that 2014 pin. It is not luck. It's what happens when you treat Pinterest like search and let one piece of work pay you for years. That's the whole idea. Invest in your marketing time once instead of feeding the feed every single day, like with Instagram. I wanna hear from you. So drop a comment. How old is your oldest pin that's still getting traffic? Or are you just getting started? Either answer is totally welcome. And if this helped, obviously I would love for you to subscribe and stick around. The next video is gonna go deeper on getting your pins found.