What Really Happened to BoardBooster and Pinterest?
A few weeks ago, people started seeing their Pinterest accounts suspended and BoardBooster seemed like the most common denominator.
Then, Pinterest sent an email to many users telling them to delete their BoardBooster accounts or risk termination.
And now, as of Wednesday, June 27th, BoardBooster is officially closing their doors.
All of this drama leaves many bloggers asking the same question,
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What Really Happened to BoardBooster and Pinterest?
If you’ve been in any blogging Facebook group, you’ve probably heard talk about BoardBooster and heard rumors of it slowly becoming less and less of a viable option for pinners.
We’ve known for awhile that BoardBooster was not one of Pinterest approved API marketing partners (see all the approved partners here), but for awhile many bloggers continued to use BoardBooster because it has some tools that other pin schedulers didn’t have.
And, most importantly, how can we avoid anything like this happening again?
The biggest problem with BoardBooster was that their tool was in violation of Pinterest’s terms of service.
From everything we’ve heard, the owner of BoardBooster was an amazing guy, who was incredible to work with, and this is where things get tricky. He was a nice guy and he created a useful service. Both of those things seem like a recipe for success. But, it wasn’t working within the rules Pinterest created.
If you are using a service that isn’t playing according to the rules (no matter how silly the rules seem), you are putting your account at risk.
This goes for any service, in any category.
If you use an external app to get Instagram followers, you risk your Instagram account being suspended.
If you use a non-Google compliant pop-up to get newsletter subscribers, that may have the short-term affect of growing your list, but will risk having your site show up in search. (HINT: MiloTree is a Google-compliant way to grow your list.)
When building your business, never sacrifice long-term growth for short-term benefit.
To avoid messes, this applies even when the risk is unclear. For a long time, Pinterest wasn’t outright saying, “Don’t use BoardBooster.” They just quietly didn’t have it on their list of approved partners.
We still don’t know why everything happened the way it did, and honestly, we try to keep this a drama-free zone.
But, we can say, that your safest bet, is always to play within the rules that the social media platforms and the Google algorithm set for us.
A couple rules that can help you find trusted programs to work with:
Question any app or program that requires you to give them your personal password:
There are certain instances where an app or service may need access to your blog, but you should never give out your personal password to anyone.
For example, our tech support person has his own login to our blog, as does our ad network. Setting them up with their own accounts keeps everyone accountable to the actions that they take on the site, and minimizes the risk of hackers or spammers gaining access.
You should never give your social media passwords to anyone or any service.
This seemed to be the downfall of BoardBooster. Some of the features that were unique to BoardBooster required that they have your username and password for your Pinterest account.
This violated Pinterest’s Terms of Service and lead to many accounts being marked as spam, due to log ins from all over the world, including countries that are notorious for spammers. Pinterest had to put these rules into place to protect their service from spam, but sadly that protection came at the expense of services like BoardBooster.
In fact, if you had a BoardBooster account make sure to delete it and change your Pinterest password so no one has access to your account.
Make sure the services you use are compliant with all the social media platforms, and Google’s regulations:
Nothing is worth losing your social media accounts or Google’s trust. As social media services have grown in the past few years, they are starting to be clearer about what they are looking for.
BoardBooster got popular at a time when Pinterest wasn’t really communicating with us as clearly about what they wanted and what they didn’t want. Many people fell in love with the service then, and understandably didn’t want to learn a new program until they had to.
Thankfully, going forward this should be less of an issue. As social media platforms become more transparent with how they’d like to be used, it will be easier for us to start out with tools and growth strategies that comply with their rules.
This is one reason that choosing an approved Pinterest marketing parter is an important step to take when choosing what scheduler to switch to after BoardBooster’s closure.
Be careful where you get advice:
In the world of blogging, we are constantly getting advice and recommendations from people. Be careful about what advice you take to heart.
If some one recommends a product or service, ask them what specifically they like about it. Then ask them how long they’ve used the service. Many times, people will get an affiliate link to a service when they signed up for it the day beforem and start talking about how great it is. Proceed with caution in this case.
While we are huge fans of affiliate marketing when done well, it’s important to recognize that not everyone promotes affiliates in an ethical way. Look for people who use or rave about a product even where they are not allowed to share an affiliate link.
Look for people who have used a service for months (or even years!) and listen to what they are saying about the product.
If you want more details, you can also private message people and sometimes get a more honest answer about a product than you would get in a public Facebook group.
Many people are 100% positive publicly, but willing to dish some more details privately. So if you have doubts, be willing to take things “off the record” to get more information.
And by the way, the scheduler we use and stand by is Tailwind.
(I’m adding our affiliate link here because we’ve been using it for years. We started just when they launched and it has helped us grow our Catch My Party Pinterest followers to over 850k.
If you have any questions about it, please reach out to me. We know the people at Tailwind personally, and we are always impressed with how much care they put into their products.)
Stay flexible:
Our last tip, but arguably the most important. Our industry is ever evolving and always changing. We know changes like this can be stressful and we are here to help!
If you need advice about navigating a new platform, pop in to our MiloTree Facebook group, and we’ll do our best to walk you through it.
If you just need some one to commiserate with you about how annoying it is to have to re-learn a new method for scheduling pins, we are here for that too!
Put your blog growth on auto-pilot safely with MiloTree:
Because we know how stressful times like these can be, we wanted to help take things off your plate.
While you worry about learning a new Pinterest scheduler, let US help you grow your following on auto-pilot.
We’re offering a FREE 30-day trial of MiloTree which can help you grow followers on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and even newsletter subscribers. All with one easily customizable (and Google-compliant!) pop-up slider.
It’s not all bad news this week! Get your free 30 days here, and let us help you keep moving forward. Today may have started out feeling like one step backward, but with a little bit of help, this can take you two steps forward with your business growth!