Guest Post: Thanks to Sarah for coming onto Simply Alex Jean to share with us how to grow Pinterest followers!
Growing Pinterest followers is hard. At first, you can think maybe you need to join group boards, how can you reach your target audience? Or you might be thinking about what rich pins do you need and what should your content strategy look like when you schedule pins? All of these are very valid questions!
It can be hard when you are first starting out to grow a loyal following that likes your content and wants to interact with it. Pinterest is a great way to gain traction for your site. It is currently my biggest traffic driver to my website, I also get traffic to my YouTube channel, and to my paid products as well! So if you are looking to grow your pageviews, Pinterest is the perfect place to start.
Before, it didn’t really matter what your Pinterest followers were because your pins could still get great reach. But that is changing and now it is better to have a larger Pinterest following if possible. Pinterest is not a social media platform, and therefore the strategies used on other social media platforms do not translate to Pinterest.
How to Grow Pinterest Followers
Optimize your Pinterest Account
The first thing you should do to help kickstart growing your Pinterest following is to make sure your account is optimized. You want to fill everything out with board covers and make sure your account is optimized for SEO, this includes your Pinterest profile. If you are using Pinterest for your work ensure you have set up a Pinterest Business Account. This will differentiate you from traditional Pinterest users so you can create content. Need help setting up your Pinterest Business Account – connect with me!
Brand your Account
This is a common question I get asked when thinking about how to get more followers on Pinterest. When looking at how to grow on Pinterest, the first thing you can do to maximize your account is to brand it. And you want to make sure that whatever brand you use for your Pinterest account is the same, or very similar, to your overall blog posts brand. That way everything is consistent across social media platforms.
Colours & Fonts in Pins
Pinterest is a very visual platform. So you want to make sure your pin designs stand out in the feed and are recognizable. So choose a few colors and fonts that you use in your pins, make them bright and vibrant, and make sure they stand out in the feed.
You also want to do this so that your dedicated audience can pick out your pins on the
feed. I have a few accounts that I follow whose pins I can pick out of the feed without a problem. That’s because all of their pins are designed a certain way that I recognize. You want to stop your audiences scrolling and have them click on your pins! And if they trust your content will always be good and recognize your pins in the feed, that is the best way to get more clicks!
Every so often it’s encouraged to mix up your pin design, colours, and fonts to see what type of analytics it gets! Sometimes changing your basics helps attract a new audience to your pins so it’s helpful to change it up every now and then. Need help with creating pins – reach out and I’d be happy to arrange pin creation services for you.
Create Board Covers
I love creating board covers for my boards. That way my account looks cohesive, and it strengthens your brand on your account.
When creating board covers you can make one template with Canva, and then just edit in your different board cover titles and images as needed. Creating board covers doesn’t need to be stressful!
Extras!
You also want to add a nice profile photo. A headshot that looks professional, or a logo if you are a faceless brand. And don’t forget to add a cover photo as well for your account! This will help new followers see who you are and want to engage with your content!
Doing any of these things individually may not help you in growing your Pinterest followers, but doing them all together will help you! In order to attract people to your account, you want to make your account a nice one to follow.
And you do this by making your account look nice, filled out, and not spammy by adding a face (or logo) to the brand!
How to grow your pinterest followers with SEO
Once you’ve filled out your account, you want to make sure your account, boards, and pins, get seen by the most people. So you need to add SEO into your strategy. SEO is a huge topic and there is a lot that goes into it, but for the most part, what you want to do is make your account able to be found in search. You want to find keywords that are relevant to your account and put them in your board titles, board descriptions, your account bio, and your pin descriptions.
To find keywords for your account, you can just type in your topic in the Pinterest search bar, and the most popular search will pop up. These are all phrases that, as long they are relevant, you can use on your account.
The more keywords you have on your account, the better Pinterest will understand what your account is about. And that is important so they know where to show your pins on the feed, to try and help you get ranked in search and get more eye onto your pins! All of that combined will help you grow your Pinterest following.
To learn more about Pinterest SEO, check out my video on it here!
Pinterest Marketing Strategy
You also need to have a good Pinterest marketing strategy in place. Because if your pinning is all over the place and it’s all irrelevant, you won’t be gaining many new Pinterest followers.
Pin Consistently
First, you want to be pinning consistently. This is a pretty obvious tip, in order to grow a following you need to be active on the platform. How much you pin doesn’t really matter that much anymore, it’s more about consistency and quality over quantity.
I pin anywhere between 2-5 pins every day, and that is a good range of content to put out. You no longer need to put out 10-15 pins with a mix of your content and others. In fact, that many pins may get your account marked as spam. Whatever amount of pins that you can put out in a day without burning yourself out is
good. As a Pinterest manager, I see accounts with as little as 2 pins a day growing just as well, if not faster, than accounts doing 5 pins a day.
Create Click-Worthy Pins
You not only want to have eye-catching pins, but you also want to make sure you have a great title and entice people to click. It’s not all about design, you also want to get people to follow through and make it to your website.
If you have a nice-looking pin, but the title isn’t something your audience is interested in, then catching their eye was useless because you didn’t get the Pinterest to follow, or the click to your site.
If this post was helpful and you’d like any more Pinterest help, I offer a ton of help on my YouTube channel which can be found right here! Check it out –blog and YouTube.
Thank Sarah for this fantastic post on how to grow Pinterest followers! Sarah’s blog focuses on productivity, mindset, manifestation, and blogging tips! Check out her YouTube channel, she mainly covers social media and Pinterest marketing! You can find her at my socials here – Blog | Youtube | Twitter
Talk soon!
Admittedly, I am not using Pinterest too much at the moment, though I do enjoy creating pins for my longer articles and guides. With what I have created, I have gotten a feel for the types of fonts and colors and I enjoy, and that does help further my consistency.
Thank you for sharing some simple ways to set up the right type of Pinterest account and get started in SEO!
Wonderful tips! I’m still trying to figure out Pinterest and this post is very helpful. I will definitely apply this the next time I create a pin. Thank you for sharing Simply Alex Jean and Sarah!
Fantastic to hear – it sounds like you’ve got the basics! Pinterest craves consistency so to have it working to its full potential I encourage having pins go out daily if your schedule permits it! Happy Pinning and wonderful to hear this guest post was helpful!
It can be tricky, I’m glad this post helped with giving some information!
Great tips here 🙂 I’m still trying to grow my Pinterest account. My followers have gone up this month, but my views have gone down which is weird?! I think I need to concentrate on SEO a bit more, and maybe changing it up a bit with different designs like you said 🙂
http://thetravelvine.blog
I need to do these steps. I love Pinterest but very much struggle to understand it.
I haven’t been using Pinterest for a while because my views kept going down. I really struggle with consistency & using keywords which I’m sure are the reason my views keep going down! I think I should sit down one day and learn. x
I finally manage to fix my Pinterest account even tho I need to step up with my game.
These are amazing tips Alex! I am still trying to grow my Pinterest account lol and if I am to be honest, I haven’t really been consistent on my Pinterest account. I don’t know if I have mentioned this before but Pinterest is the one social media I have struggled with the most. But I have managed to gain almost a 100 followers on there lol. I see a lot of people excelling at Pinterest and I just can’t imagine how they do it. I’ll be trying your tips out as soon as I can.
Thanks for this helpful post!
~Michelle
I’m currently starting again with my Pinterest as it hasn’t really been working for me so this post was really useful. I will definitely make more use of SEO — thanks!
Thanks for this post. I get quite a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but I do feel like I neglect it a bit…oops. What I have noticed is that older pins tend to be more active than newer ones, likes it takes a while for them to settle into the system or something. I plan on being a better Pinterest user, so these recommendations are fantastic for me x
I love these tips for growing Pinterest! I used to get a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but it’s dropped drastically over the last few months and I don’t know why! I’m going to start to have a proper look at it over the next few weeks and see what happens! x
Lucy | http://www.lucymary.co.uk
Thanks for this! I’ve just started blogging and I’ve been looking for hints and tips to promote http://www.ThisHappyHuman.com and engage with my readers.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience!
Really really love and appreciate this post! I’ve been working on my Pinterest for a while which is linked to my blog and reading posts like this is always such a help. I’m not to best when it comes to social media and knowing how to grow but I’m constantly learning new things. Thank you so much for sharing today’s post with us lovely Xo
Elle – ellegracedeveson.com
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve had so much problems with Pinterest that one comment won’t cover it but I still like to keep it going because it does bring readers to my blog. Maybe it’s time for me to do some updates again!
These are great tips! I really need to focus more on Pinterest SEO. I pin around 3 a day but I habent seen much growth. Will definitely look in Pinterest SEO more.
I needed theses tips, I just started taking my Pinterest seriously but I didn’t understand it. Thanks 😊
These are all amazing tips! We get a huge chunk of our visits from Pinterest and really love to work on it! There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but interest SEO has helped a lot! x
Great guest post! I’m alway looking for ways to improve my Pinterest. I think adding more keywords to my profile and boards would be a big help. Thanks for sharing Alex!
These are fantastic tips for growing your Pinterest followers! I ditched the idea though because the new algorithm suggests that repinning does nothing to help, so I just figured why I should care about it.
Great post! I love finding new social media hacks, although Pinterest is not my favourite I have to admit x
okay, wow! I learned a lot from this post! I never really thought of using truly growing my Pinterest cause I never knew how! This post just answered all my questions.
This is really helpful. I’ve found it so difficult to grow recently. I’m definitely going to try these tips.
I always try to make mine super different – it seems like I should be trying to make them more similar instead so that the pins are recognizably mine. Thanks for sharing!
Great post! I knew a lot of this, but it’s important to have it all laid out this way so I appreciate this post.
It’s wonderful to hear these tips were helpful for you! Yes, your views are strongly connected with SEO as opposed to your follower count (followers help but shouldn’t be your sole strategy). I hope focusing a bit more on SEO and designs will help increase your reach for your pins and help with more views and traffic to site!
Awesome to hear – it can be a lot to learn. If you’re interested in an audit or strategy session just let me know!
You got it – Pinterest is all about consistency, SEO, and using keywords! If you ever want to arrange a strategy session with me or an audit let me know I’m happy to help teach some useful strategies with Pinterest.
I hope doing a board review and update helps! It’s good to do that every couple of months to ensure the most up-to-date keywords are placed within that board title/description.
Wonderful to hear – happy pinning!
Thanks, Ruth – Sarah did a lovely job with this post! Two of the best things you can do is be consistent and use keywords – let me know if you’d like to book a strategy session if you’d like a more in-depth look into how to grow your account.
Wonderful to hear – happy pinning!
Best of luck with your new Pinterest Molly – SEO is great and really helps your account take off from day 1! Let me know if you’d like to arrange a strategy session to discuss how to get your account working in your favour!
I’m glad to hear posts like this are helping with learning more about Pinterest – best of luck if you do decide to jump back on Pinterest. I’m always here if you need any help or want a strategy session.
Amazing to hear Pinterest is a great traffic source for you – it can take a couple of days for pins to gain traction and get indexed within Pinterest. I’m glad to hear you enjoyed this post!
I’m so glad to hear you’ve found this post helpful! Pinterest has had a couple of updates recently and so there are quite a few people who had drops in views which adjusting to the new updates. Feel free to connect if you’d like an audit set up to review your account. Happy Pinning.
Fantastic to hear – best of luck with using Pinterest to help get traffic to your blog.
I’m so glad to hear Elle – Sarah did a fantastic job with this post!
I’m glad to hear this post is helpful for you Jenni – feel free to message me if you’d ever like a strategy session or an audit of your account.
That sounds like a great number to be pinning her day Vourneen – yes SEO will definitely help increase your reach which will help with increasing your traffic. Let me know if you need any help or assistance with keywords or to optimize your account/profile.
So glad to hear this post is helpful – best of luck with Pinterest!
Thanks, Cristina – Sarah did a great job with packing this post full of great tips. I’m glad to hear SEO has helped and Pinterest has worked well as a source for blog traffic for you three!
Fantastic to hear Tiffany – yes keywords are so helpful with helping your pins to get even more views and traffic!
Thanks Riyah – Sarah did a wonderful job with this post. Yes repinning is no longer best practice as it wants creators to focus on just that – creating!
Thanks, Eleanor – I’m glad to hear this was helpful. Pinterest can be quite a bit to learn, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with a strategy session or audit.
That’s fantastic to hear Anke – best of luck with growing your Pinterest followers!
I’m glad to hear you enjoyed Sarah’s guest post Kelly – I hope these tips work well with your account.
Honestly, Katie, each account reacts differently! I’ve found switching up designs helps some pins get a better reach but I also hear from other pinners that uniform pins help their account – so play around and see what works best for your account. Happy Pinning!
Thanks, Giulia – Sarah did a fantastic job with this post.
Great tips. Thank you.
I really need them right now. I am going to do the board covers ASAP.
I’m so glad to hear – board covers really are so easy to make and tie together the look of your account! Happy Pinning