How To Get More Followers On Pinterest: 20 Tips For Growth

Discover how to improve your presence on Pinterest and increase your following. Learn which tactics may actually be hurting your efforts and which ones that will spike engagement. Here’s 20 powerful ways to grow your audience on Pinterest.

So you want to learn how to get more followers on Pinterest. When I asked Nicole, who writes the food blog “Or Whatever You Do,” how she gets more followers on Pinterest, this was her very first piece of advice:

“The general consensus seems to be Pin really great content that you love, and your followers will, too.”

That’s an awesome place to start. You’re trying to grow your own following on Pinterest, whether that’s through CoSchedule’s Social Calendar or the platform of your choice, I thought I’d share her tips and research with all of you, too.

Without further ado, here are 20 ways to get more followers on Pinterest.

1. Optimize Your Pinterest Profile To Get More Followers

While your Pins are likely some of the first things potential followers see from your brand, it’s super important to optimize your Pinterest profile to help you get more followers.

Make a good first impression by thoroughly filling out your profile so potential followers give you the chance to share information about your blog, brand, and your other social networks.

2. Improve Your Rank In Search Engines

Start with Business Account Basics and slide the Search privacy button to No. This way, you help Pinners find your content through search engines. Which could help you get more visibility in image searches with popular search engines like Google.

Recommended Reading: How to Determine Your Marketing Tactics

3. Boost Your Credibility

Ensure your profile area is up-to-date and reflects well for your brand. Include a professional picture or logo for your profile photo. Add a brief description of your business and the value you offer potential Pinterest followers in the About you field.

Wrap it up with one of the most important fields: Confirm your Website. This field helps Pinterest verify your site so you can use Rich Pins to add bonus information, which gets Pinned by more than 2 million people every day. When you confirm your site, Pinterest also shows the verified icon on your profile, which proves to users your credibility.

4. Connect Social Networks

You can also connect your other social networks directly into Pinterest. This simple practice can attract your followers from other platforms to your Pinterest account.

When you connect your Twitter handle (or Facebook and Google+ profiles), the icon will show up in your Pinterest profile, so your followers can easily jump between your social networks and increase your followers all around.

5. Include Pin It And Follow Prompts

Nicole suggests having Pin it and follow prompts on your site to help convert the traffic you get into Pinners and followers.

Convert blog visitors into Pinterest followers. And when you click on that button, an appealing window opens from Pinterest to help you easily convert your visitors into Pinterest followers.

Create Pin It buttons for specific blog posts and also grab a follow button you can embed in your theme.

Pin It

Recommended Reading:

• Are You Excited? You Can Now Pin To Pinterest With CoSchedule
• How To Improve Your Visual Marketing On Pinterest And Instagram
• A Cheat Sheet For Marketing On Pinterest
• The Ultimate Guide On How To Use Pinterest For Marketing

6. Share Your Pinterest Love

Some of your followers on other social networks may also like to follow you on Pinterest. And it turns out, Pinterest is smart enough to help you share your Pins and boards on your other social networks easily.

Share your Pins to followers on other networks to encourage them to follow you on Pinterest.

Pro Tip: Grab the Pin link to easily schedule a social message right in your CoSchedule social media calendar.

7. Repin Often

Nicole says:

“Don’t be spammy. Pin at least 50/50 ratio of other content to your own. Treat Pinterest like its own entity, so get creative and CURATE.”

That says a lot. Pinterest is an information discovery engine: Like a social site fused with a search engine. Pinterest feeds on curation, and Pinners demand conformity to the culture for its participants.

Here are the major reasons why Repinning will help you get more followers:

1. You will connect with more people who share similar interests. Pinners take notice of those who Repin their work often, which can lead to follows.
2. You will build robust boards of curated content to vet your ideas. By Pinning other folks’ content to your boards, you can see which boards get the most followers and double down the time you invest into creating original content to increase your followers even more.
3. You will show potential followers that you’re not just out for #1. Focus on building a community; curating and Repinning are an undeniable first step.

Takeaway: Define the amount of content you’ll curate and Repin, and stick to the plan. When you find great content from a Pinner, plan to share their Pins a few times to build a connection that could turn into a follow.

8. Follow Pinners Who Already Love You

Who says you have to wait for people to follow you? Following 5 to 10 people a day can make a huge difference compared to waiting for follows. Pinterest relies on participation—and especially at first, you might have to make the first move to grow your following.

To get started, find Pinners who have shared your content because they already know who you are. Simply search on Pinterest using this query: https://www.pinterest.com/source/YourDomain.com/. Then you’ll see all the Pins that came from your domain—complete with the Pinners’ names.

Nicole says:

“Make sure that you trust the source you’re Pinning from. If it’s spammy or not legit, you can be flagged as spam and land in Pinterest jail. So watch who you follow.”

9. Find Pinners Who’ve Already Pinned From Your Blog

You can learn a lot from Pinterest Analytics including:

1. Your own profile’s best-performing Pins and boards. Use that knowledge to share more content that is similar to your top performers. This will increase your Repins and help you reach new followers.
2. Your existing audience’s demographics and interests. Just like before, use that information to help you curate more content that suits their interests and plan original Pins that they’ll love.
3. Your top activity for content shared from your domain. This is where you can find the top Pins from your content and most popular boards. Use this information to find folks who already love your content and engage with them through Repins, comments, and follows.

The Activity tab in your Pinterest Analytics is probably the best place to start to find new potential followers. Simply scroll through to find the Pinners who gave you your top Pin impressions, and the boards that were most popular for your content.

10. Recruit Pinterest Followers

Everyone seems to have their favorite social networks, so why not reach out to your existing friends to see if they’d also like to connect with you on Pinterest? It turns out, Pinterest thought that was a pretty good idea and created a Find Friends feature right in the tool itself. Since you’ve already connected your other social profiles like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ into Pinterest, just navigate from your Pinterest profile to the Find Friends page.

From there, you can follow the people you already know from your other networks.

11. Follow Your Competition’s Pinterest Followers

When content marketer Matthew Barby decided to start a food blog from absolutely nothing, he wrote about his experience getting his initial followers. One tactic that worked for him involved researching his top competition and following the boards of his competitors’ followers.

This process, combined with solid content strategy, helped Matthew get an initial 515 Pinterest followers for a very competitive niche. The best part is that you can follow his advice and experience similar results.

Pro Tip: If you wanna catch your competition’s followers in near real-time so you know they’re likely still active on Pinterest, use the query you just learned, but substitute your competitor’s domain in it: https://www.pinterest.com/source/YourCompetitorsDomain.com/.

12. Meet New Pinners

Here’s another Pinterest tip from Nicole:

“Get into GREAT group boards, but don’t go crazy with Pinning. When people follow those boards, they see your content, which could influence more shares. You want to find group boards that have high followers and relatively low contributors.”

When you join a group board, you will instantly have access to more followers—to every Pinner who already follows that group board. Seems like great advice, so how can you find group boards that are right for you to contribute to? Start with PinGroupie. It’s a database site that will help you find group boards to grow your following on Pinterest.

13. Build A Community With Pinners You Love

While existing group boards are a great way to tap into the leg work someone else has done to grow their Pinterest following, you can start a group board yourself and invite Pinners to join you.

Creating a new group board will help you tap into the followers your friends already have. A good place to start is to define your rules for participation, then invite others to join you once they can see the benefits of Pinning with you are worth it.

Write your guidelines up briefly, then add a note into your board description on how people can contact you to join.

14. Comment On Pins

You can start with Popular Pins, a category that Pinterest creates with Pins that get a lot of engagement. Find a couple that you have experience with, and comment on them to share your perspective. Provide your take on the Pin, additional advice it’s missing, or takeaways you’ve learned on that topic.

Providing value within a comment  increases your visibility—and the potential of earning new followers—because you’re commenting on the most popular content on Pinterest.

While that sounds smart, another very targeted way to reach more people is to comment on Pins from those who’ve already shared your content. Build trust with people who already know who you are by showing them the real personality behind your blog or brand.

An easy tactic when commenting is to ask someone a question via a mention to spark up a conversation. The more interaction, the more likely they’ll be to follow you.

An example from Brand Talk generating comments and then replying to their feedback!

Brand Talk on Pinterest

15. Label Your Boards

Remember when you read that Pinterest is a fusion between social and search engines? That applies to the names and descriptions you use in your boards, which help potential followers find your Pins. Rebekah Radice suggests that Pinterest boards should be direct, descriptive, and personal to help you get more followers. And a few of the defining elements that make good boards stand out to new followers are solid cover images, keyword rich names and descriptions, and a niche focus.

Let’s explore each of those areas to help you get more followers by optimizing your boards:

Consider the following when choosing your cover images:

1. Rock a high-quality image.
2. Make it colorful or out of the ordinary to catch the eye.
3. Fit it into the constraints of the board cover itself (222 x 150 pixels is the perfect size).
4. Make sure it represents the topic of the board.

You can create an image specifically for your board cover following those guidelines.

Your blog likely has a content core: The magical place where you strategize what you want to say with what your audience wants to know. The process looks a little like this:

Use the words your audience uses to describe that niche in your board descriptions.

When you defined your target niche, you likely also found several sub-topics that you could cover. Use those topics in your board names to help Pinners find your content.

Note: By focusing each board on one clear topic, you’ll make it easy for Pinners who are interested in those very niche and specific subjects to find them!

16. Enhance Your Pin Designs

Some kinds of content perform significantly better than others on Pinterest. So it makes sense, then, to use the experience from others to improve your own Pins:

1. Images without faces get 23% more Repins than those that have faces. Craziness.
2. Red and orange Pins get two times as many Repins when compared to blue (and other dominant color) Pins.
3. Pins with less distracting backgrounds get more traffic. So stick with simple designs.
4. Longer is better. Design pins that are larger tend to get the most traffic.

Nicole explains the art behind designing images and graphics for Pinterest:

Use vertical collage-type Pins, which perform much better on average than regular verticals because they take up more space on a user’s screen. And always, always, always consider how it looks on mobile. Small and ugly text on photos can end up being totally unreadable on a mobile device. And a lot of people are mobile pinning.

And, of course, Nicole is right. 75% of Pinterest’s users rock Pinterest on their mobile devices. That means if you don’t consider mobile in your design, you’re neglecting how three-fourths of your followers prefer to experience your content.

17. Use Keywords In Your Pin Descriptions

You’ve already found keywords for your blog posts that you’re Pinning. Use those same keywords in your Pin descriptions to help potential followers find your content.

Target keywords in your Pin descriptions to help potential followers find your content.

Recommended Reading: An SEO Driven Approach To Content Marketing: The Complete Guide

18. Pin At Optimal Times

Pinners are more active on certain days and times than others.So when is the best time to post on Pinterest?

When we analyzed 10 studies to find the best times to post on social media, the data told us:

• Saturdays are definitely the best for Pinning to Pinterest, and specifically from 8–11 p.m.
• Next up is any day between 2–4 a.m. or 2–4 p.m.
• Try Pinning on Fridays at 3 p.m.

That’s the sweeping general answer. You can Pin a lot every day, so what are really the best times when your audience is using Pinterest? Sharing at the peak times when they’re online could help you get more followers.

Grab this Google Analytics custom report to find the best day to Pin based on your own audience (the report is also available in your kit that complements this post).

You’ll see the list of days of the week when you typically get the most traffic from Pinterest.

You can drill in even further to find the specific best time to Pin to Pinterest on any day of the week.

19. Share More Often

How many times to Pin a day? It’s a good question because if you Pin too little, there really isn’t a reason to follow you, while if you Pin too much, you just get annoying. So is there a magical number of times to Pin a day to help you get more Pinterest followers?

That was the question I explored recently analyzing 10 different studies to find a recommended minimum, maximum, and a solid starting point for how often to Pin.

Here’s what that research uncovered:

The pros all disagree. Some say a maximum Pinning frequency is 3 times a day whereas others say 20. Some say a minimum is 5 while others say 10.

So I averaged all of those studies’ data to find a starting point for an ideal daily Pinning frequency: Pin 9 times a day.

After you get started, test sending a few more Pins, then a few less. Use the Google Analytics reports in your kit to understand if your tests had positive impacts on your traffic, then continue doing what works.

Pinterest is a high volume sharing community—so error on the side of more engagement than less.

20. Schedule Your Pins Throughout The Day

It’s probably the quickest way to lose followers if all you do is pin tons of pins at the same time and focus only on your most recent post.

Don’t share everything at once: Instead of clouding your followers’ feeds with your pins all at once, time your pins to go out at regular intervals.

So, what’s the best approach?

• Use CoSchedule’s Social Calendar to plan ahead and schedule content on Pinterest right from your calendar. Three simple steps; write out your message, select Pinterest as your social profile, and choose your publish date. Then, your pinterest content will publish at your scheduled time, with no more work needed.
• Schedule your Pins around the peak times when your audience is most active. Use your best day and best time Google Analytics dashboards to understand when you typically get the most traffic so you can schedule your Pins to get noticed.
• Start by scheduling 9 Pins a day, with at least 5 of those being curated content.

Here’s an example of what scheduling your pins  could look like to help you visualize your work:

Simply fill out your desired message and choose the day you’d like your pins to go live!

By this point, you’re pretty much a follower-generating machine.

Now go build an audience that’ll help you grow your blog. You’ve got this!

This post was originally written by Nathan Ellering in 2016. It was revised in 2023 with contributions from Paige Nordstrom.