How to Build a Pinterest Following
Alright, you’ve got all of the best Pinterest tools for your business up and running, right? Great. Now is the time to leverage all of that potential marketing power by building a solid and engaged Pinterest following.
For the uninitiated, Pinterest now has over 70 million users and over 500,000 business pages, and can help you drive website traffic, boost your brand, and grow your business. Using the following proactive techniques and strategies, you’ll be able to develop a substantial following and put one of the most effective and fastest growing social media platforms to work for you. What are you waiting for? Time to start to pinning.
10. Create More Specific Boards
It might seem like creating boards with broad categories might attract large followings, but the truth is you want to take a more targeted approach by creating more niched boards, which stand a better chance of being found and followed by a targeted audience.
The most popular users have a diverse array of specific boards, usually ranging from 50 to 100. The number that you use will vary depending on you topics and the audiences you are targeting. Just be sure not to spread yourself too thin with so many boards that you can’t keep up with them all. Focus on refining your boards to be more relevant to the specific types of followers you are looking to attract.
9. Post To Your Most Popular Boards
Keep in mind that many people prefer following boards on particular subjects that interest them, not always the person who created the board. So, instead of pushing your entire profile, you may find that promoting your most popular boards will attract more followers. Assess your profile and determine which of your boards is the most successful and promote those ones heavily.
8. Use Keywords, Descriptive Titles & Hashtags
Learn what your target audiences are looking for on Pinterest by using the search function to find specific hashtags that are relevant to your brand. Using accurate longtail keywords, trending topics and hashtags in your pin descriptions can be incredibly powerful ways to draw more followers and repins. According to Reachli.com, pins related to trending topics see a 94% increase in click-throughs. You can use Trendsmap and Google Trends to find out what topics are the hottest at a particular time. Just be sure you’re using hashtags that are appropriate for the audiences you’re looking to attract, as you don’t want to mislead people in a cheap attempt to gain followers, as those people won’t stick around. Then go on to measure what’s working and what’s not using the Tailwind app and Pin Alerts.
Be sure that you use descriptive titles for your boards as well as your images. They should be creative, engaging and personal to entice people, but specific enough so that they know what the board or pin will be about.
7. Launch A Contest
Contests have proven to be an incredibly effective way to increase engagement on social media, and Pinterest is no exception. You can set up a variety of contests including giving away prizes or products to users who repin a particular pin of yours or when they create a pinboard about why they love your brand, company or product. Rafflecopter is a great tool to help you launch and manage contests and giveaways. Contests are a great way to encourage people to share your content, which in turn gets more eyeballs and followers for your boards.
6. Follow High Profile And Relevant Pinners
A big component of using Pinterest, and social media in general, is the reciprocal component. By following 5 to 10 new people per week, you can develop a steady growth of people following you back. You want to focus on following people who are particularly relevant to your business and brand, so that you develop a strong network of people who are most likely to follow you back, repin, like and comment on your content.
You also want to be sure that roughly 10% of the people you follow to be major players in your industry. These thought leaders and trendsetters can not only help inform you about what content attracts people and what’s trending, but if some of them follow you back, you dramatically increase your chances of attracting more followers from their legions of fans.
5. Comment, Repin, And Tag
In the spirit of reciprocity, you also want to be sure you’re engaging with your community and target audience by repinning and commenting on other people’s pins in the Popular section. But be sure to actually take time to actually explore the pin and make an informed comment. You don’t want to sound like you’re just clamoring for follow-backs or endorse something that isn’t of high quality. You also want to avoid leaving too many comments as Pinterest views this as spam and can suspend your account.
You can also develop your community on Pinterest and generate a following by tagging people and other businesses in your industry in pins that you think would interest them. This is a great way to show your engagement as a leader in your industry and encourage other people to follow you back.
4. Add The Pinterest Follow Button
A relatively simple way to attract more followers, but one that many forget, is to add a Pinterest Follow button to your website. This will help convert visitors to become new followers, and is especially useful if you have a high traffic website.
Add the button to your website and blog in prominent places, including the header, footer, sidebar, and particularly on original images that are on your website. You can use the Pinterest widget creator or create a custom button with your website developer or CMS. Be sure it leads visitors to your brand page and offers a way from them to easily convert to becoming a follower.
3. Promote Your Pinterest Account In Your Email Newsletter and Signature
This technique may also seem straightforward, but many brands often forget to put it into action. Start by adding a link to your Pinterest brand page in your email signature, that way every time you email someone, you increase your chances of gaining a new follower.
Then, utilize your email newsletter to spread the word about your Pinterest account and encourage people to follow. Be sure to incorporate enticing images and particularly popular pins to encourage readers to follow you.
2. Link With Your Other Social Media Accounts
Capitalize on all of the work that you’ve put into developing followings for your other social media accounts by linking them to your Pinterest account. Invite friends, followers and business connections on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to attract more followers.
You should also share and promote pins on those other social media platforms, so be sure to incorporate hashtags and keywords that can function across platforms. But keep in mind, you may not want to share everything you pin with the other social media outlets as you could overwhelm your other followers, so be selective about what you share.
1. Curate Great Content and Images
One of the most important ways to build a following on Pinterest is by pinning high quality content and beautiful images as it’s the great content that draws people in and makes them want to continue following you. At the end of the day, all of your efforts to generate followers will be in vain if when visitors arrive on your page or boards they don’t find anything worth re-pinning or following.
Take the time to curate and create great content that is specifically relevant to your brand and target audience. Repinning is, of course, part of the process, but you also want to be sure you’re bringing something new to the table.
And as Pinterest is such a visual medium, you want to be sure that you’re utilizing beautiful, enticing images to attract followers. If the Pinterest bookmarklet doesn’t automatically generate an attractive image, or one isn’t available, manually create the pin using a high quality image from a Creative Commons image database or upload your own. Keep in mind that you can also pin videos too, which can be particularly engaging.
There are lots of ways to generate a following on Pinterest, and these guidelines should help position you attract many more followers. What techniques have you found to be most effective for building a strong Pinterest following? Let us know in the comment section.
Sources
- “9 Ways To Build Your Pinterest Audience” (Entrepreneur)
- “10 Tips To Get More Followers On Pinterest” (Search Engine Journal)
- “13 Ways To Get More Pinterest Followers” (Search Engine Journal)
- “The Ultimate Guide For Mastering Pinterest For Marketing” (Hubspot)
