How To Get More Pinterest Followers

Would you like to grow your Pinterest followers? Of course you would. Here’s how:

#1. Follow Others

It”s very easy to say ‘follow other people’ but how do you find them?

• If you look at the left hand side of the gallery page, you’ll see ‘Find Friends’ and if you have included your twitter and facebook names on pinterest, it will show those of your facebook friends as well as those you follow on twitter who are on Pinterest. The chances are that if you follow them, they will follow you back. You might want to check their accounts are active though – as many seem to set up a Pinterest account, repin a few images and then forget about it.
• Search for areas of interest e.g crochet and follow those boards or pinners you genuinely find to be of interest. Engage with them by commenting or repinning and they may follow you back.
• When you repin a pin, you’ll see a pop up box come up telling you what other board that pin is on with an option to follow that board. If it looks to be of interest to you, follow it. It’s a handy way of finding great pinners to follow.

#2 Post Beautiful  / Useful Pins

To rephrase William Morris’s quote ‘Have nothing on your pinterest boards that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’.

• Pins should be strikingly beautiful – before pinning, ask yourself ‘Is this worthy of being repinned?’
• Pins should be useful or show that their link will answer a question or solve a problem for their intended market e.g. How to get more pinterest followers, how to sew on a button quickly, 9 ways to plait your hair, how to lose weight and keep it off, how to keep algae out of your pond …….
• Look at the most popular pins (you’ll find these in the categories section)- how many repins are they achieving and what is it about them that is proving popular?

#3 Be Original

While we advise the 80/20 rule, 20% being pins from your own website, do try to ensure that a portion of the 80% are pins from other websites you know your followers will find useful or striking – don’t just repin from pinterest.

#4 Pin Little & Often

You will lose followers if you pin too many images of the same theme in one go.  Seeing an excess of similar pins on the gallery page from one pinner can almost look like spam.  Pin little and often, ensuring that you are pinning from other websites as well as your own content. Use the tailwind scheduling tool to spread them out. Here’s a post explaining how to use the Tailwind scheduling tool.

#5 Naming Your Boards

Consider the naming of your boards carefully. Boards are showing in google, as high as the top slot on page one so ensure they are named with keywords that people are using to search for images or information. The example below for the search term ‘space saving ideas’ shows a pinterest board with that name showing up at number one in a google search.

Pinterest’s Interests also provide good indicators regarding board names. For example, if you imagine you are one of your customers who is searching for ‘dresses’, you’ll see a number of sub-categories come up under the Interests. You can see the most popular categories immediately. Therefore, if you sell  elegant vintage dresses including wedding dresses in that style – you could set up three boards for those pins e.g. Elegant Dresses, Wedding Dresses, Vintage Dresses, Vintage Wedding Dresses and pin your own pins (as well as other inspirational pins) to those boards although not all on the same day!

#6 Be Original

When writing the description for your pins, be original, show your personality, keep it short, and include keywords. Use your description to invite action, be it to encourage a comment, a repin or a click through to the website.

#7 Be Long, Tall & Skinny

The column layout of the Pinterest page means that the space given to image is determined by its width, therefore portrait images have more visibility than landscape images.

It is interesting that the design for posters for many new films has changed and they are now ‘long, tall and skinny’.  Images that are more visible on the gallery page have a higher chance of being seen, being repinned or liked which translates into you gaining more followers.

Some of the posters for The Hobbit are even ‘extra long’.

 #8 Don’t Pin The Same Pin Numerous Times

It is extremely important that you do not pin the same image from your website numerous times because your most recent pins show if someone clicks on your profile and  your ‘pins’ – you will appear boring if numerous ones are the same. Therefore, if you do wish to share the same pin to different boards (as I suggested in #5 as a good tactic) ensure that you spread them out over days and weeks – using the scheduling tool for convenience.

#9 Build Links 

 #10 Your Pinterest Board Layout

#11 Start Shared Boards

#12. Becoming A Suggested Board

Having a very focused, well populated and frequently visited board can mean that your board is featured on Pinterest. From time to time, I’ve noticed significantly more followers to one of my boards which suggests it is being shown as a ‘suggested board to follow’ to new members.