Pinterest is growing at a staggering rate, emerging as one of the best social media platforms to market your business or grow your personal brand.
Pinterest’s report reveals that attributed conversions grew by 2.5X year-on-year (y-o-y). It means businesses that marketed on Pinterest witnessed a positive ROI.
Further, Pinterest registered a 46 percent y-o-y increase in revenue and a 26 percent y-o-y increase in monthly active users in Q4 of 2019.
It shows Pinterest is a thriving place for people and businesses eager to grow their online presence.
If you’re one of them, then this post is for you. Here, I’ll take you through 16 effective ways to get more Pinterest followers.
You’ll witness a massive increase in your following if you implement these Pinterest growth hacks.
Without further ado, let’s dive straight away.
1. Understand How Pinterest Works
The first step towards nailing Pinterest marketing is to understand how it operates so that you can use the platform the right way.
Most people misinterpret Pinterest as just another social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Although it allows you to interact with other users – known as Pinners – it functions more as a discovery platform than a networking site.
Pinterest states that it’s a “visual discovery engine” that helps you find ideas and inspirations, thereby motivating you to innovate and create.
So before you take the plunge and work towards building your Pinterest audience, you must know how to go about it. And you must begin by getting familiar with Pinterest.
If you want to know about how Pinterest works, check out their Help section.
2. Complete your Pinterest Profile
Once you are aware of how Pinterest works, it’s time to optimize your Profile.
An incomplete Profile may turn off Pinners exploring your Pinterest account. Therefore, ensure its completion in all aspects.
You need to provide the following details (here I’m referring to my Business account on Pinterest):
- Display name
- Username
- About your profile
- Email address
- Address
- Phone number
Under the “Claims” section (see the screenshot), you can provide your website information. Further, you can also add a cover image to make it more appealing.
The idea behind a complete Profile is developing trust in Pinners. If they see you’ve listed every bit of information, they’ll follow and interact with your business.
3. Know your Target Audience
Now it’s time to find people who’re interested in your business and the content you provide on your Pinterest account.
Pinning up random Pins on the Boards is a bad idea because:
- You won’t get quality leads for your business
- You won’t build authority in your niche
- You’ll end up wasting time and resources
But, at the same time, if you know who your target audience is, you’ll be able to use Pinterest to its full potential, generating maximum exposure and sales.
To know about your target audience, you can:
- Create buyer personas
- Analyze your competitors
- Conduct surveys & polls
- Take feedback from your existing customers
Getting familiar with your target audience will tell you about their interests, behavior, demographics, and keywords they are using to fulfill their search.
When you have the potential keywords, you can use these to create Pins and Boards on Pinterest.
Further, keyword searches on Pinterest will help you discover brands, people, and Boards that you can follow to extend reach and gain followers.
4. Optimize Pinterest Boards
Creating Boards is like organizing Pins into categories. It’s crucial to optimize Boards for:
- Organizing content in a systematic way
- Rendering an enriching user experience
- Attaining higher search engine rankings
- Ensuring ease of navigation
While creating a Board, ensure you provide every bit of information. Once the Board is live, you can edit it to feed details, such as:
- Board cover: The picture that acts as a cover image, showing relevant details, mostly the Board title and keywords against a complementing visual.
- Name: As evident, it’s the Board name. Make it keyword-rich.
- Description: Write a lengthy description (up to 500 characters), inserting suitable keywords and information.
- Collaborators: You can invite other Pinners to collaborate and form a Group Board. It’s a great way to get more followers on Pinterest.
5. Create & Post Original Content
While Repins can help you generate traffic and followers for your Pinterest profile, the original content will help you stand out in the crowd.
When you create original Pins and post them for the first time on Pinterest, Pinners will notice and interact with them, thereby increasing engagement on your Pinterest profile.
To come up with a perfect Pin, focus on:
- Using a vertical image or video in 2:3 size ratio because it’s what Pinterest recommends
- Write captivating titles that generate curiosity
- Write detailed descriptions that contain keywords and relevant hashtags (use only 3-4)
- Add a destination link to the landing page
- Select a suitable Board
Use your designing skills to create compelling Pins in stunning colors and fonts. A tool like Canva can help you design Pins in bulk.
When the Pins are ready, schedule them for publishing using social media management tools like Viraltag or Tailwind.
6. Re-pin Content Regularly
It’s impractical to create original Pins every day unless you have a dedicated designer team or have ample time to do so.
Repinning content that’s already available on Pinterest is a great way to create a collection of Pins for your profile.
Repinning content helps you to:
- Generate traffic to your Pinterest profile and website
- Boost authority of your profile
- Facilitate collaboration with Pinners and content creators
Devote time every day to Repin interesting content that provides value to the viewers. This is because a Repin dwells in your profile under a suitable Board. And if the content is not worthy, people will not follow you.
Therefore, you should aim at providing the best content to viewers.
7. Follow Potential Pinners
Creating connections help you everywhere, even on Pinterest. To grow here, you must socialize with other active Pinners.
Following established Pinners who have a massive presence on Pinterest helps because you:
- Get content to Repin
- Get an opportunity to collaborate with them (creating Group Boards, for example)
- Get ideas and inspirations to create Pins
- Can gain followers by interacting with their content
To find Pinners, simply click on the “Following” button on the “Home Feed”, and then click on “Find People to Follow” to discover Pinners in various categories.
Follow and engage with them to mark your presence and increase your follower count on Pinterest.
However, ensure you don’t spam their Profiles. Otherwise, it may spoil your reputation as a content creator.
Pro Tip: To find Pinners who pinned your website content on Pinterest Boards, use the following query: https://www.pinterest.com/source/YourDomain.com/.
Replace “YourDomain.com” with your domain name, hit enter, and you’ll see all the people who pinned your content on Pinterest.
Now appreciate their efforts by following and engaging with them, increasing your follower count in return.
8. Promote on your Blog
Cross-promoting your Pinterest Profile on your blog – and vice-versa – is an effective way to increase Pinterest activity that, in turn, will increase follower count.
When you display Pins on your blog, you may introduce your Pinterest Profile to new visitors who may end up following you.
To embed a Pin in your blog, you simply need to get the embed code for the Pin. Check out the screenshot to see how to generate an embed code for a Pin.
Once you have the code, insert it into the website code. If your website is on WordPress, use a plugin or simply paste the code in the “Embed” block in the Gutenberg editor.
Simultaneously, you can promote blog posts, product catalogs, and other website content on Pinterest by creating a Pin and adding the link to the landing page.
9. Link, Cross-Post & Promote on Other Social Media Platforms
Pinterest allows you to share Pins on different social media platforms. This is an excellent way to show your content to an audience on a social media site like Facebook or Twitter.
Those who are not yet following you on Pinterest may check out and follow you after coming across your Pins.
Pinterest has an in-built mechanism to share content via:
- Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
- WhatsApp, an online chatting app
- Copying links and sharing them on any platform
- Personal connections on Pinterest
If you don’t own a website or a blog, you can direct Pinterest traffic to any of your social media accounts by specifying the URL as the destination link.
Similarly, you can cross-promote content on Pinterest that you’ve shared on other social networking websites. However, ensure the image or video dimensions are in a 2:3 aspect ratio. You can use Canva or PosterMyWall.
10. Conduct Contests & Giveaways
Contests and giveaways are some of the best ways to exponentially increase engagement and follower count. This is because people always want to participate in fun activities wherein there’s a chance to win goodies.
Even statistics say that contests have a conversion rate of around 34 percent and 94.46 percent of the time participants share the promotion details immediately after registering.
Pinterest can serve as a platform for you to promote your offerings in the form of contests and giveaways. If your offer is lucrative enough, Pinners will participate.
However, you should abide by the Pinterest guidelines on contests and giveaways to ensure you don’t engage in foul practices unknowingly.
11. Hack into Competitors’ Strategies
This is one of the easiest and most effective Pinterest marketing strategies to get new followers. You don’t need to do the hard work when your competitors have done it already.
You just need to analyze what they’re doing to gain traction on Pinterest. This may include:
- Checking out types of content they’re sharing on the platform
- Studying the publishing pattern and schedule
- Analyzing engagement on their Pins and Boards
But to pursue all these, you need to find competitors who are doing really well on Pinterest. There are a few ways to do this:
- Search for keywords in your niche and sort the results based on Pins, People, Boards, and Videos to find your competitors
- Tune your home feed by managing your boards, topics, people you follow and search history
When you apply these techniques, you’ll find avid Pinners and viral content that includes Pins and Boards.
Study these and apply reverse engineering to find out what’s the secret behind your competitors’ success. Replicate strategies that may help you attract new followers on Pinterest.
ViralTag has a host of analytics features you can utilize to understand your competition.
12. Harness the Potential of Group Boards
Group Boards are similar to normal Boards; the only difference is that you can collaborate with other Pinners to produce content for these boards.
It’s like a network of Pinners, helping each other to promote content and garner followers on Pinterest.
For example, if you are into blogging, you can collaborate with other bloggers to create a Group Board. Now, all collaborators will be responsible for:
- Pinning Pins on this Board
- Repinning Pins to support each other
- Maintain integrity and follow rules as collaborators
- Promote valuable content and not generic stuff
The consistent effort will definitely help you gain followers and views on Pinterest.
Here’s an example of a Group Board on Pinterest. It has more than 100,000 followers and a valuable collection of Pins.
However, you should approach Group Boards with caution. If you don’t manage it properly, it may hamper your progress as a Pinner. Abide by the following guidelines:
- Collaborate with Pinners who produce valuable content and are active on Pinterest
- Pin regularly to keep the Board alive
- Support each other by Repinning content
- Don’t collaborate with anyone and everyone; establish criteria to be a part of the Group Board
To create a Group Board, head over to any Board in your Pinterest Profile, and click on the “+” icon, visible just below the Board name.
Now you can either search a collaborator by name or email address or copy the link and share it with collaborators.
13. Increase your Engagement & Be Consistent
Creating Boards and Pinning and Repinning content can certainly boost your authority and popularity on Pinterest.
However, you should be more outgoing to increase your engagement by:
- Leaving meaningful comments that provide value
- Mentioning people in comments
- Reacting to Pins
- Adding your photos if you tried the Pin
It’ll take time to witness measurable results. So be consistent and stick to a regime for at least a couple of weeks. For example, you can plan to engage with around 20 Pins a day for a month.
To further maximize the impact, consider Pinning content at particular times and days. Studies suggest that the best times to post on Pinterest are 8–11 pm on Saturdays and 2-4 pm on other days.
Further, Pinners say the more you post, the better will be the outcome. Although there’s no definite number of Pins you should post every day, studies reveal that on average, 9 Pins a day works best for all Pinners.
Pro Tip: You can also use Google Analytics to study what’s the best time and day to post on Pinterest. Further, check out what’s the impact of posting a different number of Pins over a period of time.
14. Automate Pinterest Marketing
Time is the most important aspect for anyone, including marketers. And since they always have multiple tasks up to their sleeves, they need tools that can automate tasks and ease their workload.
You can use effective social media marketing tools like Viraltag or Tailwind to automate Pinterest marketing. It will increase engagement on the platform and you’ll also save a considerable amount of time and resources.
These Pinterest marketing automation tools can help you in the following ways:
- Schedule content for weeks
- Create content with the help of in-built and third-party tools
- Customize every Pin in detail
- Measure performance and tweak accordingly
- Connect to RSS feeds and social media accounts for content generation
- Collaborate with members to facilitate teamwork
- Recycle evergreen content and post periodically
Tailwind gives you an edge as it provides two unique features: Tailwind Tribes and SmartLoop.
The former allows you to tap into your niche for content and influencers whereas the latter ensures unlimited availability of content for your Pinterest account.
15. Run Paid Campaigns
To boost your marketing efforts and increase your presence on Pinterest, you can run advertisements.
For this, you need to visit Pinterest Ads Manager. Here you can manage everything – right from campaign goals to advertisements to billings and audiences.
For an advertisement to be really successful, you must focus on creating compelling Pins and ad copies.
A minimalist yet captivating design, persuading copy, and a clear call-to-action – if you can nail these three aspects, then there are higher chances of success.
Pro Tip: Use those Pins in advertisements that are already performing well in Pinterest’s organic feed.
One more thing, create custom audiences in Pinterest Ads Manager to target different kinds of people based on their interaction with your online properties.
For example, you can upload a list of contacts you already own, target visitors who visited your website, create an act alike audience that’s similar to the one you already have, and so on.
16. Analyze & Strategize At least Once a Month
Any strategy that you implement to get new followers on Pinterest, measure and analyze the performance and results to ensure you are on the track to achieve your goals.
Pinterest Business account gives you access to the Analytics section wherein you can analyze your Pinterest activities – and then later optimize them – to avail maximum benefits.
You can dig deep into insights related to Pins, Audience, and Video. There are various filters to sort results based on day, date, time, devices, region, clicks, type of content, etc.
If not daily or weekly, try analyzing thoroughly at least once or twice a month. It’ll help you in restructuring existing campaigns and launching new ones.
Conclusion
Now you know all the hacks to exponentially grow your follower count on Pinterest. If you implement these wisely, be consistent, measure periodically, and have patience, you’ll witness positive growth.
You don’t have to implement all these strategies; pick the ones that you can implement as of now. You can always scale up or down depending on your needs.
For example, you can focus on organic promotions if you don’t want to invest in paid advertising right now.
Now, over to you. Do you have any doubts or want to share any of your secret tips to get more followers on Pinterest?
In either case, do leave your comments below.
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