4 Sure Ways to Expand Your Pinterest Followers

Do you love Pinterest, but don’t have enough followers to repin your material? Don’t worry, we can help you help yourself with that.

Pinterest is a very unique platform in comparison to all of the other ones (Facebook, Twitter, Google+). It shares an entirely different format, and it’s intentions are to help people categorize their ideas in creative ways by allowing them to attach ‘pins’ to specific boards. Assuming you know most of the basics about Pinterest, let’s get right down to what you came here for… to grow your followers.

1. Sharing

This is the most basic advice I can give anyone. As much as people see this as a no-brainer, you’d be quite surprised how many people wonder why they don’t have a large following base when they themselves only post a few times a day, maybe even a few times a week. Pinterest requires that you share a lot of content to maximize your exposure. Not that this is a problem for most Pinterest users, but it’s good to pin at least ten things a day at a minimum (the more the merrier!). Try to scatter them throughout the day, because your followers don’t want to be overloaded with 50 of your pins in an hour. Give them enough content to keep them interested, and coming back for more.

Look at it this way, the more you pin, the more followers you win. Increasing your pins means that you get more exposure throughout the day giving you higher visibility among the Pinterest community. When you pin great content, people will begin to notice and start repinning your pins. This is what you want people to do, as your pins will then be exposed to their audience. That’s how Pinterest holds its value. Speaking of value, make sure that your pins hold quality content. People won’t pin useless material if they don’t find a use or interest in it. Therefore keep in mind to pin relevant material to your audience, otherwise you’ll start to lose them. Lastly, as people we love to see all the pretty stuff. Images are far more likely to be repinned than simple text content. When people like(pin) your pins, Pinterest will provide them with suggestions to other boards you have that they may be interested in. When you pin, you’ll also have suggestions on other people to follow for related material. This is Pinterest’s way of connecting people who have similar interests.

2. Engage With Popular Pins

Pinterest has a ‘Popular Section’ where you can check out the most trending pins. Make sure to engage in the pin by commenting on it. Add some value, don’t just be like “Great pin!” Say something that shows people you know something about this subject and that you care. Maybe comment on other ways to use the pins. People will take notice, and chances are they will come to your page and follow you too. Don’t overdo the commenting though, if you start to comment on anything and everything, Pinterest will warn you about spamming. Therefore, stick to only relevant quality pins.

3. Promote Individual Boards

Do you have 30 average boards, and 5 really great ones? Share those, people want to see what they’re interested in. Keep them organized too, if you have a DIY (Do It Yourself) board with pictures of cats, scenery, and interesting infographics, chances are your followers won’t look forward to your DIY pins. Keep those cat pictures in a cat board, and your DIY projects in your DIY board. When you start to provide direct content to the topic, your followers will be more inclined to sharing more of your pins. Use your best boards to grow your audience by reaching out to pinners interested in those specific boards. Do this by promoting your individual boards. Keep updating all of your other boards so that when you have a good pool of relevant content, you can start promoting them too.

4. Follow Other Pinners

Here’s another no brainer, you have to give if you want to get. Go to your pins and look through them to see who else has pinned them. Check their profile, and if you share a lot of interests in common, follow them! They’ll see that you followed them and check your profile out. If they feel you share similar interests, they will most likely follow you back. This isn’t 100% but it’s the labor involved if you want to start growing your followers. The way to achieve the best results is to follow other pinners who have quality pins related to your interests (Can’t stress this enough). On average, you might want to follow about 100-200 people per day (you want results don’t you?). Give them a couple of days, and then check back to see if any of them followed you back. The more people you follow, the higher the chance of getting a follower back, so don’t hesitate to follow more than less.

My wife tried this for one month, and in that month she went from having 200 followers, to just over 800. Now, she’s an avid pinner, but even she didn’t follow that many people. She followed about 50-100 a day and was able to achieve those results. So imagine the results you can get if you follow more people. It’s a lot of grease work, or at least it can be but you will see this pay off if you continue the process finding pinners relevant to you. Once you see that those you followed aren’t following you back, feel free to unfollow them if they are providing no use to you. There’s no reason to have a follower or follow someone who isn’t bringing any value. Results don’t happen over night, but this is a sure way to gradually increase your followers who will be very likely to interact with your pins. That’s essentially what you want anyway – so this definitely helps.

Do you have any other ways to increase your followers? What has worked for you, and what hasn’t?  If you have a strategy, we’d love to hear all about it. Share a comment or send a tweet (@BoxlessMedia)!