Good question. It seems that Pinterest is trying to kill off aff marketing IG/Twitter style. We're all aware of autobans and such. But with these changes, whether they intend to or not, they're also killing off social media influencers. I mean, how else can you prove to others that you've built up a large amount of heavily engaged community.
For a solid business model, branding may be the way to go here. Brand owners will be elated on seeing how their specialty images are doing throughout the system. Of course, they, just like all of us, will not be able to measure how well their followers are engaging. But at the same time, smart feed seems to be designed to lessen the impact of followers/following. So maybe Pinterest doesn't view followers highly the way we do.
A poor substitute to the previous pin count for measuring engagement is on the upper right dropdown where user1, user2 and 10 others saved your pin. This count doesn't seem to be a running total of repins of your particular pin, but seems to be a count within 24 hours or some other restricted period. So you'll never know how your pins could be doing over a week, a month, etc.
What I'll be doing, is the same thing I'm doing now which is multiple accounts. Some are biz accounts tied to money sites with original content, but each account acting as if they're building their own community. The biz accounts have analytics that will help measure the top pins for the past 30 days. One of the stats is a running total of repin count for particular pins. But only the top ones. New pins will be relegated to hope and mystery.
By the way, there are more changes to note:
https://www.thebloggernetwork.com/6-pinterest-changes/
