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Pinterest Hacks To Get More Followers (or How to Start Growing Your Pinterest from NOTHING)

You can find thousands of articles sharing tips on how to grow you Pinterest following. The truth is that most of them fail to explain how actually to start growing from NOTHING.

We all know how Coca Cola and Oreo have built enormous social media followings, but what if you’re not a famous brand? How about if you’ve just set up your business and had no real online presence beforehand?

This is what I’m going to focus on in this post – the first 3-4 months of your Pinterest presence.

As every beginning it could be tough and you could easily get disheartened. Most probably you will not see real results until you’ve got a fair few months into it. More competitive niches even take longer. The most important thing to remember though is to keep focused.

Have a strategy and stick to it – even if it feels like you’re going nowhere.

Here is a strategy that focuses only on results-driven tips and pieces of advice . No fluff, at all (as always).

Choose the Right Channels

This is a really important decision because the last thing you want to do is dedicate your precious time and resources in a channel that will not deliver the right results.

The main thing to consider is who your target market is and what type of content you’ll be producing.

If your business rely heavily on images to get the attention of the potential customers, you have to invest on Pinterest – recipe, food industry, DIY, craft, fashion and many other industries are marketing on Pinterest and get really good ROI.

Picking the Right Images

Once you’ve decided that Pinterest is just for your business, you need to consider how you’ll differentiate yourself from your competitors. There’s a lot of noise in social media (and Pinterest in particular), so you want to make sure that your posts stand out from the crowd and can be easily recognized.

Pinterest is all about the visual stimulation. People are inclined to scan through their Pinterest home screen, quickly flicking through images until something catches their eye.

If you want your pins to stand out, they have to include engaging, beautiful or adorable images. Make sure you choose an image that isn’t too small, blurry, or low quality.

Here is a great branding example of a well-crafted image strategy:

Pinterest

If you’re not great with image editing tools like Photoshop or GIMP, you can create your designs with DigitalOcto’s DesignPro (no design skills needed), or use any of the 1500+ post design ideas that are offered. It will take you less than 3 min for each post to customize it. Amazing, isn’t it. And all this for free.

Remember, don’t underestimate the power of good imagery. Getting this right from day one has such a big impact on the engagement levels and brand recognition in the long run so you need to consider it carefully.

If you start creating custom images to share on Pinterest (and social medias a whole) then you need to make sure that you have a process in place to create and share them as easily and quickly as possible.

As I mentioned, you can use DesignPro image editor tool powered by DigitalOcto and once your image is done, you can schedule each of your posts with all of the imagery attached directly in DigitalOcto SmartPublisher.

Analyze Your Competitors

Another huge source of inspiration and best practices within your industry can come from analyzing what is working for your competitors (and what’s not working).

The first step is to identify some of the leaders in your niche. A great start is performing some simple Google searches by searching for relevant keywords. This will return your competitors.

Once you’ve put together a list of around 20-30 competitors, it’s time to extract their social media profiles. You can do this manually by visiting their website and then finding their social links, or you could use a tool like BuzzStream (paid tool) that will automatically pull in any related social media profiles and email addresses.

Then try to analyze how they approach their Pinterest profile and what seems to work for them.

Best Practices for Setting Up Your Pinterest Account

Use Pinterest Business Accounts

I would strongly advise creating a business account because it comes with loads of awesome benefits. For instance, after your website domain name is verified you can add clickable links to the website.

Pinterest Analytics

Another great area you can’t miss is the free analytics for business accounts where all insights you need are shown for you. You can analyze the performance of your profile by looking at the number of impressions for each pin. You will no doubt see some pins with lots of impressions and others with next to none. By analyzing the results, you can adopt your content creation strategy accordingly and optimize your keywords to find better results. This is how you will gradually figure out what works for your Pinterest profile and how to make it a success.

Add Rich Pins

Rich pins are “super pins” that give additional information about the image you are pinning. Right now, there are four types of rich pins: app, product, recipe and article. The additional information is pulled directly from your website and added to the pin (see examples of how a rich pin looks like).

Pinterest

There are great advantages of using rich pins: they automatically update with your website, they stand out and they make shopping or finding information on Pinterest easier.

Include Location

On Pinterest it is possible to show location straight in the profile page. And if you ask me why it is so important, the answer is simple: your Pinterest profile will appear more often in searches from that specific location. Also, people from the area will notice when they browse and will be more interested in visiting you.

Eliminate Search Privacy

If your search privacy feature is not turned off, you need to head over to Settings and check the details in the Account basics. After all, you want your Pinterest profile to reach as many people as possible and search engines are a great way to bring more traffic to your business.

Rich Board Names

One of the best things about Pinterest boards is that they can show in Google search results. That gives you an excellent opportunity to improve your organic search rankings and build traffic.

Finding the right keywords to name your board is an effective way to make your boards rank high in Google search results. Think of it: if a long-tail keyword contains the word Pinterest (think “Smart Pinterest marketing tips”), it is likely to rank well on Google. Niche-specific keywords that cover a narrow topic also tend to do well in Google rankings.

Of course creating the board is just the beginning. You will also need to make the board relevant to your profile by building great content and keeping it updated.

Getting Those First Few Followers

Getting those first few followers is hard. You’ve got great content to share, but nobody to share it with. Not a good situation.

But it is not time to start worrying about it. Not just yet. You have to start somewhere and I will suggest a few effective tricks that you can use to get those initial followers going. Here’s how…

Building an engaged following on Pinterest takes time, but I guarantee that if you follow those tips on a daily bases, you will soon see some results.

  1. You’ve already had a list of your competitors’ Pinterest pages. Go to them and click on their followers. For the next 2 weeks or so, you should follow around 50 of their followers’ boards each day
  2. Search for users based on hashtags relevant to your niche and follow their boards too (about 50 boards a day). Do not follow more than 100 boards per day.
  3. For a great start, you need to create between 5 and 10 boards of your own that cover a range of different topics. Each week, you should aim to create another 3-4 boards.
  4. Pin as much content from your website as possible into a selection of your different boards. Add long descriptions to each pin with 2-4 hashtags.
  5. On a daily basis, go through your feed and repin about 10 pins onto your different boards. At best you can go and do that twice – three times a day.

You might feel discourage because this sounds like quite time consuming task, but I believe you can get it done in around 15 minutes per day if you are organized and turn it into daily routine.

If you stick at this, it will have a huge impact on both your following size and your engagement levels.

Conclusions

Remember that on Pinterest you always need to share really good content in order to get great followers but those people that may become followers should be able to see your account first. Use the hacks above in order to increase follower numbers faster. As an extra tip, be sure that you have many boards with many pins before you start trying to get new followers. Nobody really likes seeing an account without a lot of content and not many followers.