In the first part of this three part series about Pinterest I discussed five ways to drive more traffic to your website with Pinterest. The second part focused on five ways to get more repins and how to get them to go viral. In this third and final instalment I discuss five ways to increase the number of right followers for your Pinterest account.
1. Connect with Existing Social Media Contacts
When you sign up for Pinterest you have the option of connecting your personal Facebook nd Twitter account with Pinterest. If you decide to go with this option you can use the “Find Friends” feature and find out which social media buddies of yours are also using Pinterest.
Carefully take a look at which of your connections are active on Pinterest and are pinning content. Find the ones that are pinning similar content to yours or people who interest you and follow them. This way, it will ensure that you’re adding the right people who share similar interests to you.
If you follow those people, some of them will follow you back.
2. Promote Your Pinterest Account on Other Social Media Networks
Sadly, Pinterest doesn’t allow people to connect their Facebook business pages with the visual social network. But that shouldn’t stop you from promoting your Pinterest page on your Facebook business page, or any social network for that matter.
Jeep added their Pinterest profile link within one of their Facebook status updates. Shortly after posting, the number of followers on their Pinterest account increased by 1000. This increased the number of followers by more than 100% within a few days. To find out more details of how effective this was, you can read the article about cross promoting with Pinterest written by Melissa Megginson of Tailwind.
Another way to get people to see your Pinterest page is by using the hashtag #PinoftheDay on social networks like Google Plus, Facebook, or Twitter. If you type in #PinoftheDay in search results for those social networks you will see many users promoting one specific pin from their Pinterest account each day.
Many of your fans or readers may not be aware that you’re on Pinterest, simply letting them know can do wonders to increase the numbers of followers on your Pinterest account.
3. Put a Pinterest Profile Widget on Your Website
If you don’t have a “follow” button for Pinterest on your blog or website, especially a website that’s highly visual, then your site needs one. It’s an easy way of getting people who love seeing the pictures on your blog to follow your visual adventures on Pinterest.
If you’re looking to visually grab your audience and lure those into following your Pinterest account consider creating a Pinterest profile widget for your website. The follow buttons and profile widgets are available at the Pinterest widget builder site.
The profile widget can be customized for different sizes, and if you want people to follow a specific board, then you can also create a board widget that gets people to follow your specific board.
4. Pin Only the Best Content
I can tell you that starting off and getting followers is hard work. Very few people on Pinterest gain gigantic amount of followers overnight. And those that usually do get a lot of followers have been featured in Pinterest newsletters.
According to a podcast done by Pinterest expert, Cynthia Sanchez, she had a friend who gained 25,000 followers for her Halloween board after it was featured in the Pinterest newsletter. But don’t bet your house on that method of getting followers.
Instead, go with the method of pinning the best content. You can pin breathtaking pictures, but you can also be pin visuals that provide useful information. One of the best ways is to be able to combine a little bit of both.
Here’s a pin posted by fellow Food Bloggers of Canada member Kathy from Eat Halifax. Notice how beautiful the picture is and how she uses text to lure people to find out more about the recipe.
Other ways you can gain followers is by creating your own infographics, or instructographic. If you at first you find that the pin doesn’t get much traction, don’t be afraid to repin that old pin a few months later.
Also consider the time the season. You may want to start creating pins on how to make the best Christmas dessert ever. Or when Valentine’s Day arrives you may want to post romantic recipes for two.
If you’re not 100% satisfied with the pin you’re sharing, or repining then don’t. Influential pinners with millions of followers pin the best pins that are aimed at their specific reading and viewing audience.
5. Join a Pinterest Group Board
Joining the right group board, not only potentially exposes your pins to hundreds of thousands of people, it’s also one of the fastest ways to gain more followers. Especially if you join the right group board that shares a similar interest.
If you follow guideline number 4, and you’re selecting the right group boards to be a part of then you’re guaranteed to get more followers.
People notice when other users pin amazing content consistently. They may ignore you the first time, they may even ignore you the third time, but if they notice you’ve been pinning great and high quality content after a dozen times on a group board, they’ll notice and they’re going to follow you.
BE CAREFUL of group boards populated by spammers that post completely unrelated topics to the group boards.
There are different ways to join a group board. Some will have rules and methods of contacting the group board founder, like the one for Food Bloggers of Canada.
For others if you happen to know someone that’s part of a group they can invite you into the group. But make sure you check out the group board first, many of them are filled with spam.
And if you can’t find one that fits your interest, then consider starting your own. All you have to do is invite other pinners who you follow and who follow you to get started.
Growing the number followers will take time and effort. I suggest that you give it six to eight months and pin, if possible, on a daily basis. If you are serious about gaining followers, then I would suggest using a Pinterest small business analytics tool like Tailwind to assist you to measure when to post, and to find out what pins are most popular.
What are your suggestions for getting more followers on Pinterest? Please share in the comments below.
You can unsubscribe any time!
Wow! Thanks so much for the amazing tips! That image with the text that lures, is beautiful! Definitely makes me want to “pin” it and check out the recipe!
Hi Christine, I’m glad that the blog post was useful. Text definitely is something that should be added to any picture in terms of getting more pinners and followers. I hope you have a wonderful holiday.
Thanks, that was really helpful!
My favourite Pinterest tool is PinPinterest com It has given me about 55k followers for my Pinterest and floods my blog with unique visitors everyday 🙂
It is free to use, runs on the cloud, optimised for use on mobile devices, easy to setup, has Pin Scheduling feature and Speed Control…
The best thing I like about PinPinterest is that it has Intelligent Content Detection algorithms, which pin only images relevant to my business to my boards 🙂
I can fully rely on PinPinterest for my Pinterest marketing 🙂
Gaining followers and building marketing base on Pinterest is no less than a headache. I tried a number of tools to manage my three accounts but was very disappointed until I discovered PinPinterest [com]. The best thing about this tool was that via the multiple account management option, I was able to handle all my accounts in a single PinPinterest account. Moreover, this is very easy to set up and hardly took me five minutes. Apart from this, my other favorite feature is sophisticated artificial intelligence, which screened the content and pinned only the relevant items on my boards.
What an informative post. Gaining followers on Pinterest has always been a great challenge for me. The Pinterest platform is all about being active and posting unique content that includes beautiful visuals. Your article is good and helped me explore more options. Thanks for sharing.