#142 – Do Followers Matter on Pinterest?

Do followers matter on Pinterest? Today’s episode is all about answering that question (plus tips on how to up your follower numbers).

While I don’t believe that followers are the most important part of Pinterest marketing, I do know that they are important to a lot of you! Today, I’ll share four tips for increasing your followers, and I’m going to share a bonus tip that I want you to test out.

We have started creating “pillars” for our audience members. They are directly targeted at wherever you find yourself in your Pinterest marketing journey.

If you’re a beginner (new to Pinterest or this podcast), you’ll want to sign up for our free, four-week newsletter series that we have packed full of all our favorite Pinterest resources, specifically designed for beginners. We know you have tons of questions and we want to help you get a firm foundation set up.

Once you’ve mastered the beginner content in the first pillar, we have another newsletter series for you. This series will help you continue to grow and get super strategic with your Pinterest marketing.

Do Followers Matter on Pinterest?

I get asked about followers all the time. Do they matter? We completed a study on the relationship between Pinterest followers and page views a few years back in order to answer this question. We discovered that a person who had 10,000 followers could get the same amount of traffic as someone with 50,000 followers.

Here at SPM, our goal is to deliver traffic to our client’s website. We funnel as many leads as possible to our clients and they get to decide where those leads land (an email list sign up, a product sales page, etc.) That study helped us determine that followers aren’t really all that important. Followers don’t correlate directly with a traffic.

This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through these links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Click here to read my full disclosure policy.

Pin to Reflect Who You Want to Attract

As marketers, we always want to be paying attention to what the pinner needs.

97% of pinner searches are unbranded. They are not loyal to people, brands, or companies. They are strictly interested in the pins that will inspire them, help them accomplish their goals, or dream about what’s next.

Pinterest knows this about the pinner by tracking the search data and the keywords they put in the keyword search bar.

Followers are important to the social media world and they do tell a story. Pinterest followers are not as important as Instagram followers, because the intent of users on each of these platforms is very different.

We know that followers are important to some of you though (e.g., for demonstrating reach to potential sponsors). So we want to give you the tools you need to continue to grow your followers to serve a greater goal in your business.

To quote our friends at Tailwind:

Every pin you share is a reflection of you as a pinner.

So make sure your profile, boards, and pins reflect who you are and what your account/niche is about so that the people you want to follow you will be attracted to your content.

Now, on to the tips…

4 Tips for Growing Pinterest Followers

#1 – Tell People to Follow You

My first tip is pretty obvious, but it’s the most important one. Tell people to follow you on Pinterest.

I know that plenty of you feel like you’re annoying people by asking them to follow you. But think about it this way – if I find your content on Pinterest and I click through to your website and I love what I see, I would be excited to follow you on Pinterest.

Why? Because I just came from there, and it’s a platform I love.

Your call to action might feel annoying to you, but it’s not to those who are not part of our “marketer world.”

— Kate Ahl

#2 – Post on Other Social Media Platforms

There are two specific ways you should be posting about your Pinterest activity on other social media platforms.

The first is to tell your audience that you’re on Pinterest. (See tip #1!).

Ask them to follow you in a post with an image of your Pinterest boards or with a swipe up link in your Instagram stories. Maybe your Instagram followers haven’t even thought about you being on Pinterest and just need a nudge to take action.

The second way to leverage your social media accounts is to post about a specific board that’s applicable  for the current season or what you’re currently promoting.

I heard this tip years ago from a woman who was selling makeup. She sent her Facebook audience to her board that showcased her different shades of eye makeup and asked them to save or comment on the color that best suited them. Brilliant.

#3 – Let MiloTree Help

I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I do really love the MiloTree pop-up. I started using the app in 2016 and within 8 months I had gained 1,000 followers. Almost three years later, I’ve gained over 20,000, as of March 2019.

Milotree is not a sponsor. I mention it because it’s a tool I really love (yep, I am an affiliate).

I love this product because it’s passive If you’re already getting a lot of traffic to your site, it’s a great way to gain awareness for your other platforms. My MiloTree app is now set to Instagram, Pinterest, and my email opt-in.

MiloTree currently costs $9/month. The company that created the product tests it out on their own site to make sure it’s working perfectly all the time.

#4 – Post a Link In Your Email

In my Wednesday email, I will often highlight previous episodes of the podcast, and include a URL to a pin with “pin it for later!” next to it.

This sends the reader directly to whatever pin I want them to go to. It only takes about 15 minutes to gather and insert the links, but the results can be great because now your audience is sharing your content on Pinterest for you.

Also talk about why you are using Pinterest as a place to share your content and why you love it. Again, maybe your audience doesn’t know you are on Pinterest, and they just need to be made aware!

Related: Email Marketing is Alive and Well

Bonus Tip

Create a blog post about the top five boards on your Pinterest profile. You can find these top boards (not group boards or someone else’s board) in Pinterest analytics. Talk about the value of these boards and why they might be helpful to your audience. Take a screenshot and walk through each of them.

This is a more subtle call to action but it builds awareness that you are on Pinterest to serve your audience. Everybody, and I mean everybody, wants to hear that you are serving them by providing them with free resources.

Test this out by noting the traffic this post gets. And look at the followers of the boards and make note of the number of followers on those boards. See how much interaction you can get by way of comments and saves from your audience on whichever board is their particular favorite.

Comment here and let me know what your plan is for growing your followers. I think there is great value in community and learning from each other.

Use these tips and in six months, I want to know what kind of growth you’ve been seeing. And if you have any tips on growing followers that I didn’t mention here, comment below and share them with all of us.

For further listening/reading:

• Do Pinterest Follower Numbers Affect Page Views?
• Will Following Others on Pinterest Increase Your Followers?
• Pinterest KPIs: How to Measure Your Success
• Important Pinterest Metrics: Where to Focus Your Attention

Time Stamp:

• 2:21 – A Note to Beginners
• 5:05 – Do Followers Matter on Pinterest?
• 8:08 – Reflect Who You Want to Attract
• 10:11 – #1 – Tell People to Follow You On Pinterest
• 12:22 – #2 – Post on Other Social Media Platforms
• 14:46 – #3 – Let Milo Tree Help
• 17:03 – #4 – Post a Link In Your Email
• 20:25 – Bonus Tip