Should You Still Use Hashtags on Pinterest? Here’s the Scoop.

Lately, I’ve been diving deep into Pinterest. I feel like it’s still undervalued in this industry despite so many Etsy sellers and artisans gaining a lot of traction from it. Of the three largest social media platforms (not including Twitter), Pinterest seems to provide the best opportunity for artisans to get their content found organically. Both Facebook and Instagram have made it increasingly difficult to build a following without paying for it, but Pinterest still has a huge organic reach. Yes, they do have promoted pins, but so far I’ve found that I don’t need to use them and most of the successful Pinners I know don’t use promoted pins, either.

So, all this thinking got me into researching Pinterest SEO and one of the first things I encountered was how to use hashtags. Should they be used in the same way as Instagram? Or is the system more similar to Facebook in that hashtags don’t really matter? Let’s dive in (at the end we’ll also discuss whether or not you need to add tags to old pins)!

Pinterest & Hashtags

The first problem I ran into when researching this subject was the plethora of information written between 2017 – 2018. Since social media changes so rapidly, I typically don’t like to read any advice about it that’s over 1 year old. I did read the content anyway just to get a feel for what’s changed and I found some outdated information which I’ll mention later.

Do Pins Help with SEO?