If you are ready to hire a Pinterest manager, even for something as small as an Audit or strategy session, here’s some questions you can use to make sure you’re hiring the right person.

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Hey, it’s Sarah Potter from PinPro Studio, and today we’re talking about hiring a Pinterest manager. Things that you should ask before you pull the trigger and sign a contract. This past week, talked to another person who made poor hiring choices, had somebody managing their Pinterest account and did not get the results that they were looking for.

And after doing some digging, I got the name of the person, and I checked out their website. Turns out they were from an agency. That also does social media…They do all these different things. They’ve got a bunch of VAs and they promise Pinterest, but it was horrible. I was looking at the Pinterest account and just from viewing the account, not even diving into the backside of the analytics, I can tell what the problem is from the get-go and that’s a red flag for me. So, now I must talk to this potential client and explain how I’m different. Here’s what they did wrong. This is why your account’s not working, and I am so sorry that happened.

I want to present you some questions that you can ask before you hire somebody to manage your Pinterest account. And give you those resources so that you don’t potentially waste thousands of dollars on something that isn’t going to work

All right? So aside from asking them for, just general references on examples of PIN graphics and analytics. These are some questions that dive a little bit deeper. I want you to ask these first. They’re diving a little deeper into the background and into the future outlook.

Any experienced Pinterest manager or strategist should be able to answer these questions for you with positivity. Let’s dive right in, the first thing I would ask.

• Where did they gain their experience?
• Is this something that they were just thrown at them?
• Is this something that they used in their own business to grow their own business?
• Is this something they were formally trained in?

I would honestly say that if they were formally trained, that’s going to be your best bet because they have spent the time and the effort to make sure that they were trained on the platform. Typically, the courses that you take on Pinterest marketing are going to be well rounded enough so that you can apply them to any type of niche, right?

For somebody who has built this on their own and they figured out the platform themselves, it works for their business. They may or may not have the skills it takes to transfer that over to somebody else’s business at different niche that has different trends and different, seasonal content or even e-commerce is going to be different than blogging.

You’re going to want to make sure that people are well rounded enough to handle your account versus somebody that has just figured it out on their own for their single niche. So, where the gained experience on Pinterest is going to be the first thing you can ask.

• How long ago that was?
• How long have they been on the platform?

Honestly, if they were formally trained, I don’t think it’s going to matter as if they’ve been on the platform, you know, two months or three years. Because the training itself is going to be focused on, or it should be focused on the current trends and the current best practices. Pinterest managers that have just been trained are even more up to date on the current best practices than the people who were trained a long time ago and maybe don’t have the support system.

Which leads me to question number two.

Question number two is

How do you keep up with the trends and do you have any Pinterest support system around you?

For me personally, I read Pinterest engineering blogs. I am part of paid Masterminds, full of other Pinterest strategists. I am in free groups and paid groups like Facebook groups and that kind of thing. I monitor multiple accounts across various niches. I strategize by, trial and error, and I watch the things that Pinterest says that they want and see how they perform. Based off of that information, I can kind of make sure that I’m staying up to date on the strategies because it’s working inside of Pinterest itself.

To go back to the beginning question, the number one question was you know, how’d you gain your experience? To me, it wouldn’t matter if they had been on the platform for two months or if they were on the platform for six years. As long as they have that support system that they can bounce ideas off of. That’s going to be huge in making sure that people stay up to date on the platform.

Number three.

Do you work on things outside of Pinterest?

Now, here’s where it really ruffles my feathers. Sometimes people hire social media managers to run their Pinterest accounts, and that is a disaster waiting to happen unless this manager has been formally trained in Pinterest. And I will tell you right now that most Pinterest managers start out in social media, and they niche down to Pinterest. Because it is such a robust platform that it really takes all your attention. I did the same myself. I started out managing an Instagram account. It was my very first paid job as a social media manager. And it is so different in Instagram land than it is in Pinterest world.

To have a social media manager or a social media VA or a regular VA come in and try to manage your Pinterest account without the training necessary, it’s going to be a disaster. That’s what happened to this client that I was just talking about. They’re not my client yet. I don’t know if they ever will be because they were burned.

But it is a very, very, very common thing. and so, make sure that when you ask if they work on anything outside of Pinterest, it is complimentary. Examples of that might be that they will take your PIN graphics and put them in the back end of your blog so that people can click on that graphic and save it from inside your blog.

That does not necessarily have anything to do with the function of Pinterest itself, but it boosts your Pinterest from a different platform, from the backend of your website. That’s something that I used to do for some clients and add the little SEO in with that image, and it was just a little add-on service.

I don’t typically do that because I don’t like accessing the back end of people’s websites like that. But that would be a complimentary service. Another example would be if you have a product-based business, maybe your e-commerce. And some of your products need better SEO and you’re relying mostly on Pinterest traffic to come over to your product.

Maybe somebody takes that Pinterest SEO knowledge that they have, and they help you up level your product SEO on your website because Pinterest reads the metadata of your e-com platform. That would be another example.

If you find somebody who is copywriting blog posts and doing Pinterest stuff, that may be a concern, most of them won’t do that because those are two huge different niches. Check and see which one is their biggest focus. If it is the copywriting side of it, or if it is the Pinterest writing side of it. I would venture to say that somebody who is doing copywriting probably does not have the capacity to put as much effort into Pinterest as what you’re wanting. As what you’re paying for to make it successful. So that’s another question that you can ask and be a judge of yourself.

Question number four, this goes into strategy, and it would, it would really behoove you to ask what would you prioritize.

What would you prioritize on my Pinterest account?

On my account, if they say anything other than SEO run. You can ask them what types of pins; you can ask them what content that they would try. All of those are great, great answers, and they’re important answers.

Make sure that SEO is on the top of the list. If they don’t know how to prioritize SEO on your account, how to find those keywords, where to put those keywords, that is a big red flag. Those keywords need to be in the pin graphic, the pin title, the pin description, the board title, the board description, and your bio. Ideally, they would be on your website too. If somebody is not willing to put SEO in all those places, they don’t know what they’re doing.

It is that important because Pinterest pulls all that information to make sure that it is giving your data, your pins to the right people. And if you’re not putting those keywords in all those places, you are missing out on some huge traffic opportunities. So, I would definitely ask, what it is they would prioritize on your account specifically and make sure that SEO is the foundation of that.

The last thing that you can ask, number five, is going to be analytical data. Now keep in mind that month over month growth, it’s typically not something that you’re going to see on Pinterest. You’re probably going to want to see a year over year. Because Pinterest is such evergreen, long term organic traffic, it is very possible that your traffic will dip down one month, pop back up another month, pop back up another month, and then dip down a little bit more.

It’s very common. Right now, it’s November, so last month, September and October typically see dips because Pinterest starts prioritizing seasonal content. Unless you have seasonal content, you’re probably going to see a dip in analytics. This is just a little bit deeper than what you probably asked for. If you need more information on reading analytics check out this blog. But understand that if you are asking for analytical data as proof that a Pinterest manager knows what they’re doing. Make sure that you understand if they say, hey, month over month, there is no growth, but look at how much it’s grown over the last year, it’s going to go like this. That is completely normal.

So other than that, there’s some basic questions that you can ask.

• How’s their organizational skills?
• What is it they use to track all my pins that are my content that has been put out?
•  Do you offer Google Analytic reading?

Kind of different little things like that are different things that Pinterest, Pinterest managers do. But I don’t think that they serve the foundation of a really good Pinterest strategy. They are little add on things that are pluses for you.

But I hope that gives you a good idea of some very strong questions that you can use to vet your next hire and make sure that you’re not wasting money on hiring the wrong person for your Pinterest account. If you want to learn more about Pinterest, you can check out my Youtube channel here!

Happy Pinning!

Sarah