20+ Ways To Boost Your Following

You have 2 primary goals on Pinterest, to get engagement for your material or products and to grow your brand through growing your followers.  

• Quality is more important than quantity. Better to have a small, engaged audience than a large un-engaged one
• Add the Follow button to your website. 
• Make sure your followers on other channels know you’re on Pinterest.  
• Encourage your readers to use the “tried it” feature on your Pins.
• Embed the Pin in your content, suggest they try it out and leave a comment.
• The natural step for them would be to follow you if they’re not already.

Followers and their engagement signal Pinterest how good the content is.   This affects when and where it is displayed elsewhere.

Best Practices To Grow Your followers.

1.  Pin High-Quality Content Consistently

Pinning High-quality, consistent content will go over well with Pinterest and potential followers. You need to be pinning MULTIPLE pins throughout the day. The number will depend on how much time you (or a virtual assistant) have for adding pins to your queue but consistency is a key to success.  In a different module, we will present you with many tools to assist your efforts. You can use them schedule pins over many days.   We will give you some options of how to best manage this.  

2.  Get Active - Locate, Grow & Engage Your Audience

This includes not only pinning and adding boards but also engaging other users also.

How do you engage on Pinterest?

• Pinning on a regular basis
• Go to the ‘’Explore’’ and ‘’Trending’’ pages and pin from there
• Pin other people’s content
• When you see a ‘’Board to Follow’’ in your feed, follow them if they’re relevant.
• Checking out your Pin Activity and pinning what others have pinned of yours.
• Find, join, and contribute to Communities
• Follow and engage people that save your pins from your content
• Follow and engage the to pinners in your niche
• Follow and engage your competitors top pinners

3. Utilize Source Boards To Find Followers

Give your following efforts a boost by ensuring that you follow top users interested in your product or your niche.  Evaluating yours or others source board can reveal people to follow and engage.   Save yourself a ton of research by utilizing your source board as well as the source boards of others. To reveal your sourceboard:

https://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com/

Replace yourdomain.com with your webasite URL or the URL's of your competitors to see who is pinning their content.  The view below of our source board shows all of the pins created by others directly from our website.  T

he top 4 longer images were images that we created and hid in the posts.  When someone would go to pin it, they would get that image along with the other page images as a choice. Doing so gave us more influence over what they chose.  

Notice the image o the woman with the knife and the one to the left of it, neither of those images or the words in them are relevant to the post.  You cannot always control what is said or done, but you can influence it as best as you can

4.  Pin Your Own Content Regularly

You MUST promote your own products and content if you want other people to find them and do the same. If you share well-branded content on Pinterest consistently, your pins will become recognizable.   You will notice over time that people are more likely to follow you.  

5.  Join Or Create Communities

Pinterest’s popularity as a marketing tool continues to increase among marketers and sellers. Pinterest can be used as a quick traffic generator where big amounts of traffic can be achieved, regardless of a sites authority as interpreted by Google.  Traditional Google SEO efforts can take a while before results pay off.   Pinterest SEO results are almost immediate.   Pinterest Communities, allows you to create a community around a topic.   Pins, comments and links can be shared in a community.

Pinterest Communities gives pinners a new way to communicate with others.   As well as a new way to market your content and products to an all-new audience.    A niche-defined audience whom you know the topics they like.     In a Pinterest Community, you can post comments, have conversations and most importantly, you can post links.

Each community is essentially a direct group of people with a shared interest in a topic they can create offers for.  Stake a claim on your niche community soon, because once a name has been taken, no one else can use it.

6.  Follow Your Competitors Followers

Like anything else, just because you build something doesn't mean people will find you.    A well-known and powerful strategy to find relevant followers is to follow your competitor’s followers.

Since you both have the same target audience, if they followed your competitor, they may follow you, too.

How do you find competitors?  By searching for topics in the search bar that they might have in their profile.  Something like 'mountain bike accessories”  

At the top of the results are 4 options,  All Posts, Your Pins, People and Boards.  Choose People, mixed in the results should be a happy sampling of your competitors.  Browse their profiles and begin following their followers.  You will notice right away that they are more than happy to follow you back.

7.  Start Using Sections

Sections allow you classify your content into sub-sections of the main content.   This is a newer addition to Pinterest.  They provide you an opportunity to broaden the reach of your content or product.  With Sections, you are able to easily rank for a whole range of long tail phrases.

Think of it as your chance to clarify in detail, what your content is to a search engine.  It is your chance to break out all the various uses and features as sections using long tail keyword phrases.  This has the effect of further refining and extending your relevance in the search results.

8.  Use The Search Bar

Using the search bar to search your long tail keyword phrases to find and like followers.  Remember 2 billion searches are performed monthly on Pinterest and 87% of pinners bought after seeing it pinned on Pinterest.

9.  Use Promoted Pins

Promoted pins are like FB ads but for Pinterest.   You remember the strategy right?   Best Practice: An ad with a call to action or a lead magnet to funnel, with an opt-in to build your list.   Focus the funnel on the end result of purchasing the product. the benefits derived from the sale and offer payment options at the bottom of the funnel.  

Something to keep in mind if you are an Amazon seller.   Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram all have more traffic and users than Amazon can hope for.  Any marketing that you do on any of those platforms will also appeal to potential buyers that do not buy on Amazon.  

Don't waste the traffic or the possibility of more sales.   At the bottom of your funnel, offer links to all the platforms that you sell on, but not more than 4.   If you only sell on Amazon, consider getting a Stripe account, PayPal Buy now button or Shopify Buy now button to capture those sales.  You can always fulfill it through FBA.  Why lose the chance of extra sales and expanding your reach as well as building out your list.  

11. Hashtag Marketing

Pinterest recently changed its rules regarding hashtags and no longer frowns on their use.  Hashtags are searchable and clickable.  To take full advantage of hashtags, relevance is key.   Your hashtags should be themed to the content and message.

Hashtag Overview:

• Stick to 4 hashtags per pin, you can use up to 20.  I would not as it looks spammy
• Pinterest will give hashtag suggestions while writing a description
• Also will show how many pins are under a certain hashtag 
• Hashtags have their own search feed
• Hashtag search is chronologically based

Hashtags Best Practices

• Use searchable hashtags, not social ones
• Post consistently and when users are most active on Pinterest
• Use a mix of popular and niche hashtags
• ​Great for promoting time-sensitive content
• Utilize your Instagram photos that have hashtags in the comments
• Add hashtags to the bottom of your description, not the top
• Enhance your keyword rich description strategy with hashtags
• Update frequently saved and highly searched pins

Power Tool: Hashtagify - Boost Your Content By Choosing The Best Hashtags

11. Account Age Matters

If you have an older account convert it to a business account. The better ‘seasoned’ that your account is, the better the chance that Pinterest will see it as authoritative and provide a stronger presence for you.

12. Create Infographics & Tip Lists

Infographics are a proven lead magnet for multiple reasons.

Why they’re effective:

• Infographics are 30X more likely to be read than text posts
• They convey data in a visually appealing way
• Infographics stand out in Pinterest feeds
• 40% of people react better to visual information than plain old words

13. Pin Only For Your Target Audience

An account centered around one main topic and appealing on to those interested in the topic is a stronger account

14. Share Your Pinterest Profile Link On Social Media

One of the simplest and quickest ways to bring in new followers is to share your link on other social media platforms.

15. Share Specific Boards On Other Social Media Sites

It’s also a great idea to share specific boards. If you are pinning topics related to upcoming Women's Spring Fashions, you might post something to twitter like, “Has anyone else noticed all of the exciting new Women's Fashion items for spring?? Here is a sampling I put together of things that appeal to me [ board link ].”

16. Add Pinterest To Your Email Signatures

Hopefully, by now you understand the importance of and are utilizing email signatures. Every email that you send should have links to your properties, blog, products, sharing buttons, something. Do not send a single email without some sort of link or sharing buttons to enable them to click and go directly to what you want them to be aware of.

Every time I send an email I get a handful of clicks on my social media links. Make a habit of including your link any time you mention a specific social media platform, as well as adding it to the footer of your email.

17. Add Social Share Buttons To Your Website

Giving your readers the ability to share your posts, products, and site is a basic part of brand building and raising product awareness. Providing sharing buttons throughout your pages and collateral makes it more likely they’ll pin your posts for you and also makes it more likely they’ll check out your profile and follow you.

An easy to use favorite is SumoMe’s share buttons because they appear on the side of the screen and scroll as the user moves through the post, which makes them impossible to miss. SumoMe has a full suite of sharing and list building products available. It is definitely worth checking out. Double-check that your links are easy to find and in working order!

Shown below are 3 different variations of potential share buttons

18. Add Social Media Links Throughout Your Site

19. Add Pinterest link to site header / footer / sidebar

20. Add Pinterest Link To Contact & About Page

21. Host A Pinterest Contest

An easy way to build your Pinterest following is to run a contest right on Pinterest.

Follow these 6 Best Practices when running a contest

1. Decide what the goal of the contest is and develop a strong marketing strategy to push the contest
2. Define and establish a monetization strategy if monetization is a goal.
3. Make the contest attractive to your target audience
4. Use the correct hashtags
5. Setup an effective landing page
6. Be sure that you follow Pinterest and the FTC Guidelines for contests.
   
   

This can be accomplished with several options.

Board Creation: You could ask users to create a pin or a board in order to participate.
pin: Create several Pins for users to choose from and ask users to pin the pin of their choice to enter(Pinterest rules specifically state that you cannot require users to save a specific image but can give them a selection to choose from.) This means that the third image below - Pin it to win it - is only within guidelines if they were given multiple different pins to choose from themselves to pin.

Then create a separate landing page for your content to display the prize info, rules, and winners.

According to Pinterest, if you run a contest you are not allowed to:

• Suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses you or the promotion
• Require people to pin a specific image. They have to be given an option of images to choose from to pin
• Make people pin your contest rules
• Run sweepstakes where each pin, board, like, or follow represents an entry (meaning you can only ask them to pin ONCE instead of pinning an image 50 times for 50 entries)
• Encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment
• Ask pinners to vote with pins, boards, or likes
• Require a minimum number of pins
  
  

This means the best contests (and those approved by Pinterest) are those that encourage your audience to be creative, participate, and share their ideas while also being required to follow your account.

22. The Viral Effect of Repinning Engaging Content

I saved this for last to make a point.  The true power of Pinterest is through creating and sharing engaging content.  Content that your followers find highly useful and engaging is best.   Focus on following people who themselves are established and have followings, Look at the image below and you can see the potential of how things can progress.  Harness the power of Pinterest for yourself!

Lesson Task:

Using the checklist included with this lesson, review the different follower generation techniques. We suggest that you review this checklist at a minimum of once a quarter to ensure that your Pinterest account is set up for maximizing potential traffic to your listings and content that you have deemed the most important to target.  

Next Lesson: Rich And Promoted Pins