If Pinterest marketing is on your list of goals this year, the first thing you might ask yourself is “Should I create a new Pinterest account?”.
Of course, the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no answer. There are lots of reasons you might choose to start a new Pinterest account instead of continuing with the one you have or converting your personal account to a business Pinterest account.
In this blog, I’ll go over 4 reasons you might need to start a new Pinterest account to help you make the right choice for your business! And reasons you might not need to!
4 Reasons to Create a New Pinterest Account
Some of the most common reasons you might consider starting over with your Pinterest account include pivoting your business or niche, starting from a clean slate, or because you’ve been inactive for a while.
Let’s go over each of these scenarios and whether or not you need to create a new Pinterest account after all.
1. This is your first time creating a Pinterest Business account
If you’ve never used Pinterest to market your business before, you’ll definitely need to create a new account! Pinterest does offer the option to convert your personal account to a business account, but you might not want to do that depending on your situation.
Your personal account is likely full of lots of different pins for a lot of different areas of life. Mine is a total clusterf*ck of old fashion inspo, hair tutorials, home decor, and recipes I’ve never made.
While you could make all those boards secret and start building up the business content from there, it might be easier to start fresh with a brand new Pinterest Business account.
Something else to consider is the relevance of your personal Pinterest account content to your business or brand. If a lot of the pins you’ve saved are relevant to your business content and target audience, it might make sense to convert your personal account to a business account and just optimize it appropriately.
Nine times out of ten, however, I recommend starting fresh. It’s easier for you and Pinterest to stay organized!
2. You’re completely changing your business
Pivoting in business is super common, so you might think it’s simple enough to just pivot your existing Pinterest account.
In actuality, Pinterest has already “categorized” your account as posting about particular topics in particular niches. If you go in and start posting about completely different things, it’s going to either take a while for Pinterest to relearn your content or the new content might never really take off at all!
If your business is completely changing offers, topics, or content, you’re better off starting a new Pinterest account.
Yes, even if your old Pinterest account was doing well! The content that’s performing well on that account isn’t reflective of the new direction of your business, and the new content you post won’t be aligned.
Pro tip: if you’ve changed your URL, make sure you redirect any links from your old pins to a relevant page on your current website. Or at least customize your 404 page to ensure a seamless user experience!
3. You haven’t actively used your Pinterest account in a while
Did you know that if you stop posting on Pinterest for a long time, they might actually mark your account as “inactive”?
You might have been thriving on the platform before, but if it’s been a while, your new pinning activity might not get much traction. This isn’t a guarantee, but I have seen it happen before!
Often, a period of inactivity is combined with a slight pivot, and both of those things combined can make it hard to keep growing an older Pinterest account.
How can you tell if an account is “inactive”?
There’s no set amount of time that marks an account as inactive, and there’s no fool-proof way to see if that’s what’s happening with your account. However, if you’ve been putting in 100% effort in your account with very little return, it might be time to start from scratch.
I like to give an account at least 3 months to see if we can get the traction going again before considering starting over.
With one client account, we plateaued at fewer than 10,000 monthly impressions and 100 monthly clicks, despite knowing that her pins should be performing much better than that.
We started a new account for her and in 9 months had 10x the amount of monthly impressions, saves, and outbound clicks! That was such direct confirmation that we did the right thing by starting a new Pinterest account!
As an experienced Pinterest manager, I’ll admit that it’s easier for me to make those decisions quickly, particularly as my experience is so specialized within the online service provider niche. If you have questions about your own account or a client’s account, I’m more than happy to chat it out with you!
4. Your account got suspended or caught in a spam filter
Every so often, Pinterest goes on a cleaning spree. It’s trying to maintain its reputation as a positive social network by getting rid of spam, bots, and fake accounts. Unfortunately, sometimes good, valid accounts get caught in the chaos.
If your Pinterest account has been suspended and you haven’t done anything against their Community Guidelines, it’s very likely you can get the account back. They have several channels through which you can appeal the suspension decision, and my advice is to keep reaching out until the account comes back.
Usually, the account will be reactivated and you can go back to posting like normal. There will be a slight dip in the analytics for the time the account was down, but most accounts can recover with no problem.
This isn’t the case for all accounts, unfortunately…
Mini Case Study: Pinterest Account Suspension
In December 2022, my longest-term client’s account was suspended for 3 days.
(Merry Christmas to us, right?)
We hadn’t broken any rules or posted anything against Pinterest’s platform terms. It was just one of those things.
After 3 days of going back and forth with Pinterest support, we were able to get the account reactivated. However, it was clear that things had taken a sharp turn for the worse by looking at the analytics.
With a lot of research, incognito pin searching, and comparing, it seemed as if many of my client’s previously top-ranking pins had become disassociated from her account and domain. On top of that, new pins we published weren’t getting nearly the exposure they had previously.
So we decided to start a new Pinterest account. This wasn’t a light decision to take, as my client had acquired more than 18k followers on her original Pinterest account.
But followers mean nothing on Pinterest if we aren’t getting clicks through to her site and email list opt-ins.
There were a lot of things that contributed to the decline of that client’s original Pinterest account, but currently, the new account is growing steadily. It will take time to build up to the stats of the previous account, but I believe it’s a healthier account now, which matters!
If your Pinterest account has been suspended, deactivated, or had any sort of issue, it’s not a guarantee that you need to start a new account. However, if you seem to be stuck, it might be a symptom of a greater problem that starting a new Pinterest account could resolve.
Reasons Not to Start a New Pinterest Account
I’ve covered several reasons and signs it might be time to start a new Pinterest account, but I don’t want you to start thinking any sort of change or drop in analytics means you need to start a new account.
So here are a few scenarios where I wouldn’t recommend starting a new Pinterest account!
1. Your target audience is changing
Changing your entire business offers and content is a valid reason to start a new Pinterest account. But if the business is staying the same and you’re just refining your target audience or ideal client, that doesn’t necessitate a fresh start!
Your content foundation is the same, you just need to tailor how you market that content to reach your target audience. That all comes down to specificity in your keywords, which is a strategy I cover in this Pinterest case study.
2. You don’t like your old work
So you pinned some ugly pins or designed a few brands you don’t love anymore. That in itself isn’t a strategically guided reason to scrap your Pinterest account and start fresh.
I understand you care deeply about your brand’s online presence. And you should!
But Pinterest is probably the one place it matters least. Not a single user will be scanning the ancient archives of your pins with a fine-tooth comb, looking for mistakes.
Some of those really old designs might actually be bringing in a lot of traffic for you! And while you might not love the work, once people land on your website, they’ll get the chance to reacquaint themselves with your current style and content, then make the decision about you from there.
Getting potential clients and customers to your website is the hardest and first part of your whole Pinterest marketing strategy. If it’s a less-than-perfect pin making it happen? Don’t sweat it. And definitely don’t delete the pin unless you’re ready for your account analytics to take a dip.
3. You’re rebranding
This one is similar to the second reason. Maybe you changed your business name, got a new logo, and you’ve got a totally ~elevated~ brand now. None of those are good enough reasons to start a new Pinterest account.
Once again, no one’s going to be scrolling your Pinterest and looking for that brand consistency from years past. If you still stand by the content, let it be.
From an overall account standpoint, you can update pretty much everything about the account to reflect any brand changes! Switch your handle, profile name, and claim your new website domain, if you have one.
Pro tip: A common Pinterest misconception is that you can only claim one website domain. That’s not true! You can claim multiple domains, but you can only select one to show as the main URL on your profile. If you’ve changed your website domain, leave the old one claimed, but switch the publicly displayed one to the new URL!
How to Start a New Pinterest Account
The steps to optimize a new Pinterest account are the same ones I outline in this blog post about getting started with Pinterest marketing:
- Do your keyword research
- Create a Pinterest Business account
- Claim your website
- Create a clear and keyword-optimized profile title
- Add a branded profile picture and cover image
- Write a keyword-rich bio
- Create optimized boards
- Start pinning!
However, there are some additional things to consider if you’re ditching an old Pinterest account to start fresh.
1. Claiming domains
First, you can only have a domain claimed by one Pinterest account. That means before you claim your domain on the new Pinterest account, you’ll have to unclaim it on the old one.
When you do, your analytics will reset, so make sure to export and/or screenshot any data you want to keep for your own records. I typically grab the last 6 months or up to a year, if possible.
2. What to do with your old Pinterest account
I know it may sound like a good idea to delete your old account, but don’t. Those pins are going to keep living on and possibly sending traffic to your website!
You don’t have to do any upkeep to the old account, but you can just leave it alone and let it do whatever it’s going to do.
3. Connecting to scheduling apps
If you’ve connected your old Pinterest account to your preferred scheduling platform like Tailwind or Metricool, you’ll want to connect your new one instead. Before you do, make sure you don’t have any pins scheduled that would get lost in the transition.
For Tailwind specifically, if you need to connect a new account without having to pay to add a second, you can message their team directly and they’ll help you transfer the account over!
4. Changing the handles
When you create your new Pinterest account, you’ll have to use a different handle until you change it on the old account. If you’re leaving the old account up (like I recommend), you’ll want the handle to still be reflective of your brand and not totally different or randomized.
5. Avoiding activity spikes
With any new Pinterest account, whether it’s your first one or a fresh start, you want to be careful with your activity.
As mentioned earlier, sometimes Pinterest’s spam filter can get a bit trigger-happy, so you want to avoid any sudden spikes in activity of any kind.
That means when you start optimizing your account, don’t create 50 boards all at once. Space it out over a few days.
And when you start publishing pins, start slow. Typically, I start with 1 fresh pin a day for a week, then increase by 1 per week until we hit our target pinning frequency.
So, do you need to start a new Pinterest account?
It depends. Unfortunately, there’s no cut-and-dry answer for this one, but hopefully these reasons give you a little more clarity on when (and when not) to start a new Pinterest account! If you need to talk it through with someone, I’m always available via email or DM.
For more specific and detailed convos, you can reach out to book a 60-minute Q&A!
