Why your Pinterest feed has changed & what you can do about it

Thursday, October 16, 2014

In light of Pinterest's new changes, here's everything you need to know & what you can do about them.

Social media platforms pride themselves on their adaptability. With new platforms emerging every day, threatening the success and exclusivity large platforms have, the need to secure their place in the market means they are likely to make quick, and at times, devastating changes.

Pinterest, who has, until now, been very user-focused suddenly unrolled a massive change to its user Pinterest feed that has bloggers and business owners scratching their heads and confused. Here's a break down of what's changed and what you can do to get it back to normal.

Why your Pinterest feed has changed & what you can do about it

Recently, Pinterest incorporated sponsored pins into user's news feeds. To accommodate this change and to ensure users actually view the sponsored (or promoted) pins, Pinterest adjusted the account settings of their users. The shift in account settings means that users with business accounts have reported seeing their number of repins and the amount of traffic Pinterest sends to their site, reduced.

Of course, this isn't the case with everyone. On the contrary, some business account users have reported an increase in repins and traffic as a result of this change. While the Pinterest changes aren't massive, they are noticeable and they do effect how your timeline looks. Personally, I've opted to switch my feed to the original way as I prefer to see what's recent and not be targeted for impressions just because someone's paid for a promoted post. The changes to Pinterest rely heavily on cookies that track your recent browser history and display pin ads that correlates to them as well as sponsored or promoted pins.

To remove this feature:
  1. Click on the gear icon in the top right corner of your Pinterest profile -- you can do this through either the Pinterest website or the app.
  2. Choose "Account Settings" and scroll until you come across "Personalisation".
  3. Under the personalisation section, choose no for both options, or on a mobile device, swipe the buttons so that they are no longer red. You will saying no to the following options:
    "Also use sites you've visited recently?" and
    "Also use info from our ad partners?"
  4. Save your changes and refresh your feed to see the promoted pins removed and your feed back to normal.
Enjoy!

2 comments:

  1. I am in Australia and Pinterest automatically changed me to australia feed.....I don't want it and i never asked for it so why does it just happen. The layout is totally different, I get what I click on on one side of the screen and the related feeds to the right, but I can't move down the page....I don't just want to see Australia, that's why I joined pinterest because it was worldwide!!!!!! Whoever made this decision doesn't get the reason why pinterest is popular. Im looking for another place, because this is driving me crazy trying to deal with the new format that doesn't work, and by the way there was a 3 week down time when I couldn't get pinterest at all.....Not good!!! go back to the format that worked.. I hate this and will delete my account if it doesn't give me the option of choosing the old format!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yep these fixes don't do anything for me either. I turned off Related Pins ages ago, but they still kept popping up. Now, I can't even see who pinned an item to know if it's someone I follow or not - which is probably their goal, but it's one more nail in the coffin as far as i'm concerned. I have an old version of the app on my phone and will stick with that (even a semi-functional 'like' button, the removal of which is another bad idea!); but on the web? Not if I can avoid it.

    ReplyDelete

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