Use your words
Optimizing Content for Growth (A Blow-by-Blow of My Talk at SXSW for Those Who Missed It, or for Those Who Want to Relive It Again. And Again!)
After a few private power poses and some inspired nostril breathing, Evany Thomas takes the stage at 11am on Saturday March 14, at the 2015 SXSW interactive conference. She is looking good in her new shiny Marshall’s-score pants and black blazer of glory. Her lipstick is well-applied, and she appears not to be sweating.
{IMPRESSIVELY LARGE CROWD BREAKS INTO SPIRITED APPLAUSE}
Hello everybody! My name is Evany and I work at Pinterest. And I’ve worked at a lot of other fine places before that. Today I’ll be sharing a sweet selection of learnings that I’ve picked up along the way, including: how the words we write can get more people to use the things we make, and ways the writing team at Pinterest makes sure the stuff we write is great. I’ll also make some slightly awkward Blow Pop analogies, lurch into a particularly dark period of marital strife and flash a few naked baby pictures. DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!
But before we really get started: What exactly do I mean by “growth”?
Just like lots of other places, Pinterest measures its growth in sign-ups. We also keep a close eye on how many people stick around later (AKA “retention”…gross word, I know). But something that makes Pinterest a little different from other companies is that for us, growth is just as much about how people feel as it is about numbers. We’re talking about that hard-won, easily lost affection that people have for those few companies that make their lives a little better. That kind of squishy human emotion stuff can be hard to track. Net Promoter Scores do a pretty good job of it, but nothing really beats talking directly to Pinners (that’s what we call the fine people who use Pinterest).
And happy Pinners are our most important asset. Word of mouth is the number one way people find their way to us — whether a friend sends them a come-join-Pinterest invite, or they simply overhear someone gushing about how Pinterest taught them how to make baskets out of bacon.
It’s all part of the “virtuous cycle of growth.” (All you chart lovers can breathe a sigh of relief: Here’s a bonafide wheelie for you.) When this cycle is turning the way we want, people go from “never heard of Pinterest” to “Aha!” to “Let me tell you about Pinterest…” in one fluid motion.
Or if you’re like me, and charts give you hives, here’s an age-old way of thinking about the cycle: It’s just like growing carrots. You put seeds in the ground, you give them water and sunshine and a few loving pats, something sexy happens with bees and pistols and stamens, then more seeds scatter. And repeat.
That’s what we want for Pinterest: a nice and carroty growth cycle. To do that, we need to be thoughtful and do a good job with every single layer of our experience, from the first moment you hear of Pinterest to when you make your way inside and start poking around.
I like to think of the different layers of Pinterest as a Blow Pop. (Now stick with me here…) Most candy, say peanut butter cups or your gummy peaches, you gobble up in seconds. It’s in your mouth and then it’s gone. A Blow Pop lasts. It’s like a relationship. From the wrapper to the hard candy shell all the way down to the gum inside, it delivers.
And the words we writers craft play a supremely important role at every stage of that relationship, starting with the very first thing that people come across: our name.
1. The wrapper: How to name your thing
Naming your product or service can be tricky. Ideally you want something that’s memorable, and meaningful, and internationizable. And it’s got to be legally sound…no one else is can be using it, or anything even remotely like it.
There are lots of different ways to go about it. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars hiring a fancy firm to help you. Or you could cram a fistful of hallucinogens into your pie hole and go on a vision quest. But many of us already have real on-the-ground experience when it comes to naming. If you’ve ever been a parent — to a baby, or a dog, or some other precious something that relies on you to stay alive — then you’ve been through this already.
When I first got pregnant, my husband Marco and I spent a lot of time speculating about names. Unfortunately when the baby arrived, there was a penis instead of the vagina we’d been planning on, so we suddenly found ourselves in the throes of an emergency renaming exercise. We were sleep deprived, and steeped in the constant low-level panic of new-parentdom — which turns out isn’t the best frame of mind for such an undertaking. Marco kept coming up with terrible ideas: “Come on, ‘Cruz’ is a great name! Like, Cruz is here, and he BROUGHT THE BEER!” Meanwhile I was lobbying for “‘Hawkeye’…like the talented alcoholic surgeon from the Korean wartime comedy, M*A*S*H?” A week went by, and we became more and more desperate. It was bad. Like “who is this person I just had a baby with” bad.
Finally we hit upon a plan. We focused on our must-haves: The name had to work as an end to the statement “Now accepting the Pulitzer…” And it also had to work with “Now up at bat…” That was it. And just a few hours later, we had ourselves a little Professor Desmond Thomas Baroz, AKA star catcher Desi Baroz.
If you look at how public radio show Ira Glass went about naming his show This American Life, the process was remarkably similar. (To think how close they were to naming the show Mouth Noise!)
At Pinterest we got lucky. Our co-founder Ben’s girlfriend (now his wife!) saw one of those Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” commercials that were so big five years back, and she said, “How about Pinterest?” And so it was.
2. The hard candy shell: How to describe your thing
Once you’ve got a name for your thing, you have to figure out how best to describe it. What’s your elevator pitch? Are you “the quicker picker-upper”? (Bounty paper towels.) “The happiest place on earth”? (Disneyland.) “Where everybody knows your name?” (Eponymous bar name from the 80s episodic comedy hit Cheers.) “The friendship state”? (Texas…home to this very SXSW conference!)
Or maybe your thing’s more like “An electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.” That there is Alexander Graham Bell, trying his hardest to explain the telephone. It just goes to show how difficult it can be to describe something new, even if it really is pretty simple to use.
That’s the exact same problem that Pinterest struggles with. It can be hard to explain what it is because it has so many different uses: Save articles, and recipes, travel ideas and projects you want to try…oh and funny memes, too!
Even when we asked our own employees to describe what Pinterest is, everyone had a different answer. It’s a digital scrapbook! A social network! A visual bookmarking tool!
The trouble is, when people’s experience doesn’t match their expectations, they wind up confused, or worse disappointed. Like what if someone bit into a Blow Pop and found…hummus. Or a super ball. That kind of boggling letdown is the very worst place to start a new relationship.
So we set out on a company soul-searching mission. We came up with a bunch of different possible descriptions for what we are, then we hosted focus groups, sent out surveys, and even created Facebook ads to see what resonated. And we hit on two clear winners: Pinterest is…“a visual bookmarking tool that lets you save the good stuff for later” and “a creative tool that lets you be more creative every day.” The funny thing was, the two options really only worked TOGETHER. The functional “visual bookmarking tool” was easy for people to understand, but it wasn’t very exciting. But when people got hold of the “creative tool” stuff, the value of Pinterest finally clicked. So we wound up with a combo deal: “Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.”
We’ve started sprinkling this new definition everywhere. On our “About Pinterest” pages, on our Wikipedia, on our Facebook…we even had wallet reminder cards printed. And slowly this new, consistent message has started to seeping into people’s consciousness. The press is using it, and we’re hearing new Pinners describe it this way. Best of all, our own employees are all finally describing Pinterest in one consistent way.
3. Crunching things open: Get people to come on inside
So once you have your name, and you can describe what you’re about, then there’s the whole “getting people to try it” thing.
At Pinterest, our growth team sometimes use A/B testing (which is where you divert a small percentage of your audience so they see different versions of your page, and then you keep track of what performs best) to see what kinds of messages help people join Pinterest.
About a year ago, we started working on the home page that new people see when they first come to pinterest.com. The page we had was pretty good, but we thought it could do a better job of showing how Pinterest helps people get more creative in their daily lives. So we had ourselves an ideastorm. One million PostIts later, we landed on the idea of a rotating page that showed different stories about the many interesting ways people use Pinterest.
Unfortunately the first design tanked in A/B tests. So did the second design. The team started grumbling that maybe we should give up on the idea. But we knew the concept was good because we had research to back it up, so we held strong.
Finally on like the eighth version, we hit gold. The version we launched with featured a lovely animated design with stripped down messaging, and it included new button text that we’d optimized in a whole separate round of testing. And it netted a nice 16% increase in sign-ups on the web — a pretty respectable number in growth circles. But where we really hit pay dirt was when we rolled out the new design on our mobile website and saw an 811% percent pop. Eight hundred and eleven percent! Powwww.
A few ahas I accumulated along the way:
- What you need is a great idea, and the guts to keep iterating
- Great ideas are a lovechild of data and intuition
- Never test anything you wouldn’t be thrilled to ship
And just so you know, for the writing team to be thrilled about shipping something, it’s got to be GUTSI (our version of the Marco/Evany baby-naming Pulitzer/World Series must-haves): Gets the job done. Understands its audience. Tells a coherent story. Sounds like Pinterest. Is well-written.
We also went through a similar A/B process with a project we codenamed “Giftwrap” (because you had to unwrap (sign up) Pinterest to get in).
My ahas from Giftwrap:
- At complicated moments, keep decisions simple
- Mix things up — test something old, something new, something borrowed (inspired by how other guys do it) and something completely out there
4. And finally the soft chewy center: Show people what you’ve got
“Pinterest is hard to understand, but easy to use.” This from an insightful 23-year-old Pinner from Hayward.
Just like Bell’s telephone, the ins and outs of Pinterest aren’t always as self-evident to people who are new to the service. So we’ve been working hard to find new ways to ease people into things.
Something new we just launched are these mini tutorials that pop up only if (and only if) you need them. So for people who haven’t Pinned anything yet, after a while they’ll see helpful step-by-step examples of how Pinterest works, and how other people are using it — which tidily ties back to the usecases we show them back when they sign up.
This simple addition of helpful how-tos has been hugely beneficial: When we tested it on Android, people who saw it created 6% more boards.
Something else we think a lot about is how to make the interface more intuitive. Does the way we label things makes sense? Do people get it right away, or does it add friction?
That’s exactly what was running through our minds when we named Promoted Pins, which are what we call ads on Pinterest. We spent a lot of time exploring different options, like “Paid Pins” (so straightforward! so alliterative!) and “Money Pins” (a la James Bond’s Money Penny?) and even “Presented by” (which felt so lovely and Pinterest-y), but ultimately we went with what was clearest, and what people were used to (“Promoted” being Twitter’s go-to word for its ads, too). And every single Promoted Pin is clearly labeled, so people know exactly why they’re seeing them.
And when we first introduced these ads, co-founder Ben sent an email to everyone on Pinterest, explaining in a very personal way what our plans were for Promoted Pins, and how hard we would work to make sure they’d be some of the best Pins on Pinterest. And that one-two punch of clear labeling and thoughtful explaining has helped a lot. Since our beta launch of Promoted Pins, people’s reaction has been neutral and in some cases even positive. Which, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of introducing advertising on your service, is not at all a given.
My last lingering ahas:
- Even the best designed products could use a little explaining
- Little helpful words can be a big deal
Where that leaves us
Pinterest is just about five years old now, so in a lot of ways, we’re still just a kindergarten startup. We’re at a place where all the layers of the Blow Pop are feeling pretty good, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement, and we’re always looking for new ways to make things even better, and better and better.
One thing that helps keep us going are the letters, actual hand-written letters, that our Pinners mail to our office, telling us how much they appreciate what we’ve built. And for a company that puts a lot of stock in letter writing (see Ben’s many missives to Pinners), this feels especially encouraging. We actually hang up those letters around our office, and we read them every day to keep ourselves inspired.
And while I can’t hand-write letters to all you kind people who came out to see my talk today (or who’re reading this long-form scroller later), I hope you’ll settle for this startlingly pregnant thank you postcard from yours truly. Thank you!
