If your Pinterest is looking a little light in the follower department, as many are, then this article will teach you some tips to help you get those numbers up.
Verification is the foundation
A very important step is to verify your Pinterest account. It’s easy to do and it will massively help, since it shows both your already existing followers and potential new ones that your account is genuine. Once you’ve verified it, people will see a little tick next to your account’s URL in its Pinterest profile. Verification is useful for more than just instilling your followers with trust; it also gives you access to Pinterest’s analytics, which allow you to see and understand how well your pins are doing. It’s no good getting those followers if you have no idea whether they like your content!
Rich Pins for the win…s
Rich pins are a type of pin available to businesses. They’re totally free and can be used to give more information than a regular pin. They stand out as well, which is a great way to snag a couple of new followers in and of itself. There are 5 types of rich pin: Product, Article, Recipe, Place and Movie. Here’s a small rundown on what each one does:
– Place: These pins include a map, address and phone number; ideal for giving someone directions to your business.
– Movie: These pins include ratings, information on cast members and reviews. It’s not necessarily useful to most businesses, but it’s nice to have.
– Recipe: These pins include, unsurprisingly, recipes! Very useful if your business is in the food industry, less useful to others, but like the movie pins they could potentially be used as a light-hearted way to engage your followers.
– Article: These are very useful pins for businesses, as they show the headline, author and a description of the story, which is great for reviews, blog posts or press releases and similar.
– Product: Probably the most useful rich pin for a lot of businesses, the product pins show the price (along with real time updates), availability and buying location of your products.
A normal pin (left) compared to a rich pin (right)
Optimise to socialise
If you want more people to follow you and pin your content, then make sure you optimise your website, blog or anything else you’re using so that it’s Pinterest-friendly. It’s very easy to do, you can create one-click follow and repin options using the Follow Me and Pin It widgets. That makes it really easy for any visitors to follow you and pin your content. There are plenty of neat widgets you can use to show off your content and optimise your website. A good thing you can do is highlight your favourite or most popular pins. People will see them and want to see more like them which means more followers for you! Also, remember that if you need any help with optimising or managing your Pinterest profile, you can hire a digital marketing or social media management company.
Of course, if you’re showing off bad content (shame on you), people won’t be interested in following you. You can make a big difference by just pinning an optimised image. People like to share large, bright, colourful images. With that in mind, you can make people more disposed towards your images by using warm colours like reds and oranges, and avoiding cold colours like blues and white. It’s best to keep things varied too, try and avoid using just one dominant colour; mix things up a bit. Interestingly, vertical images tend to be better received than horizontal ones. Maybe it’s because a lot of people like using Pinterest on their phones, but regardless, an ideal size is 730 x 1200 pixels. If you’re using images of you products or services too, you’ll be netting more website traffic as people go onto your site to check it out!
A good example of a colourful, eye-catching Pinterest pin
Regularity is clarity
Just like every other social media platform, when you post on Pinterest can be just as important as what you post. As usual, posting too much or too little is a sure-fire way to lose followers. It’s also important to pin at regular intervals, so that you don’t miss a whole bunch of your followers. If you time them well, your followers will repin your nice, high quality pins, getting you more exposure and more followers. But, of course, you need to make sure that you don’t pin too much, otherwise your followers will be overwhelmed and flee. After all, wouldn’t you if someone you followed posted 30 things in an hour? People generally respond best to around 20-25 pins per day, and these should be spaced out consistently throughout the day so that you can reach the maximum number of followers possible.
