How To Get Followers on Pinterest for Your Ecommerce Brand

Getting more followers on Pinterest is all about understanding the platform and how it works. Do hashtags matter? What’s really working these days? How do you find your audience?

Luckily, there are a few straightforward tweaks to your Pinterest marketing strategy that can help you grow your followers, your reach, and your ecommerce business.

10 tips for getting more Pinterest followers

A lot of work goes into building a successful profile on any social media platform, and Pinterest is no different. But the nice thing about putting work into your Pinterest account is that the lifespan of a pin is much longer than your average tweet or Instagram story.

1. Treat Pinterest like a search engine

One thing that makes this platform so different from many social media platforms is people often use Pinterest search like a regular search engine. For example, they’ll have a regular feed with pins from accounts they follow, but they’ll also go to the search bar when they’re looking for something specific, like “easy vegetarian recipes.”

That’s why it’s important to use keywords on Pinterest in things like your board name, your profile description, and your pin descriptions. You can build a list of relevant keywords for your brand right on Pinterest.

Let’s say you sell décor for nurseries. To start your list of keywords, search for “nursery” on Pinterest.

For your main “nursery” keyword, you can see a list of potential two-word keywords that get a lot of search traffic. Those keyword combinations can give you ideas for your pin descriptions, board titles, or even ideas about the kind of content you could be creating for your store.

2. Connect your Pinterest account to your Shopify store

People who use Pinterest at least weekly are 2.2 times more likely to claim it’s the most influential channel in their purchase process. The Shopify Pinterest app makes it easy to sync your website to the social channel to take advantage of the opportunity.

With Shopify and Pinterest integration, you can automatically sync your product catalog to your social profile. This allows you to quickly create and publish product pins, which make it easy for people to discover your brand and save your items.

Shopify merchant WallsNeedLove uses Pinterest to connect with its more than 51,000 followers. Users can browse and purchase products directly from the social network.

3. Enable the Pin It button on your website

With the Pinterest “Pin It” Button Shopify app, people are visually prompted with the red Pin It button when they hover over select images on your website. This allows browsers to pin and save your products to their Pinterest accounts for future reference—and in turn gives your profile more visibility.

You can see how sustainable Peruvian fashion brand Agustina does this on its website. When you browse the site, you can choose to pin items to your boards for later use.

When other people on Pinterest see the saved pins, they can click through and visit your website. You can distribute products as well as other content, such as blog posts, this way. When people save content they like from your site to their Pinterest, even more Pinners can discover and follow you.

4. Curate Pinterest boards

It’s important to give people a reason to follow you on Pinterest. If you’re purely focused on self-promotion and sales, it’ll be more difficult to cultivate a large, loyal following. But if you provide value and seek to connect with your audience, you’ll have a much easier time.

Curating high-quality Pinterest boards in clearly organized themes that align with your brand and products is a great way to organically grow your number of followers.

Pretty Presets and Actions sells templates and filters for Lightroom. It uses Pinterest to connect with its audience and stay relevant. You’ll see boards with photo editing tips, tutorials, and resources, as well as inspiration for photography. It currently has more than 85,000 followers.

5. Join or create group boards

You don’t have to create all your boards on your own. Group boards, where you collaborate with other Pinterest users and you all have permission to add pins to a shared board, can help your pins show up to your collaborators’ followers.

Here’s how it works.

• When someone follows you, they follow all of your boards.
• They’ll see pins from your boards and your group boards in their feed.
• When you add pins to the group boards, your pins will show up to your followers and your collaborators’ followers.

Before you dive in and join any group board that will have you, however, it’s important to consider how your group boards will work with your overall aesthetic, and how they fit with your existing followers.

That’s why this strategy can be best when you team up with brands who have similar audiences and aesthetics. For example, The Little Market teamed up with other LA-based brands to build a group board curating holiday gifts, and the result is a coherent and on-brand collaboration featuring all of their products.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you’re approaching any group board with a request:

• Consider how it fits with your brand. If your pins are completely different from the ones on the board, or your products don’t align with the board, it may not be the right fit for your company.
• Tailor your email. When you send a note asking to join a group board, try to personalize the email with specifics about why you want to join the board, and how your business would be a good match for the board.
• Make sure you fit the criteria. If the group board has any specifics for new members, make sure your business hits them all before sending over a request to join.

6. Create amazing visuals

Pinterest is a visual social-sharing platform by nature, so you’ll need to prep original content and a pin image for each post that will stand out. Some ideas for Pinterest content include:

• Infographics
• Lifestyle product photography
• Recipes and step-by-step how-tos
• Images with text and/or graphic overlays
• Videos and multimedia Idea Pins

Pinterest recommends using a 2:3 aspect ratio (ex: 1000 by 1500 pixels), making your brand the focal point, and including your logo somewhere.

Activewear brand WOD Nation posts beautiful photos with workout regimens featured in a text overlay. This is a great way to take advantage of the content formats Pinterest prefers, and it’s one tactic that has helped the brand amass nearly 14,000 followers.

Brilliant Business Moms is another great example of a Shopify merchant with high-quality visuals on Pinterest. It’s created a template of sorts to share titles to blog posts and other helpful content for its more than 54,000 followers. It fits the brand aesthetic and also mirrors its products—printables.

7. Schedule your pins

Since Pinterest is different from most other social media platforms, your posting schedule will be different, too. When it comes to Pinterest, pinning 10 times per day on a regular basis can boost engagement by as much as 150 times—and more engagement leads to more followers.

You can pin more frequently than you’d post to your other platforms without annoying your followers, but that doesn’t mean you need to be spending hours a day pinning to multiple different boards. You can also rely on scheduling software to plan your pins in advance.

One of the most popular tools is Tailwind, which helps you schedule pins based on defined time slots, similar to how you’d schedule your posts for Facebook or Twitter. You can also join Tailwind Tribes to share your pins with other people who are looking for relevant content to post to their boards.

8. Invest in Pinterest ads

Like most other social networks, Pinterest also offers paid promotion via advertising and promoted pins. It reports that brands that use Pinterest ads earn a two times higher return on ad spend compared to other social channels.

Pinterest ads help boost your following because you can increase visibility to a specific target audience. This allows you to get super personalized with your ad creative and messaging, which in turn boosts ad effectiveness.

9. Add Pinterest Follow buttons to your website

While Pinterest is a great way to connect with new audiences, it’s also an ideal platform to stay connected to existing customers. As such, you’ll want to share links to your Pinterest profile in other places. With a single click, users will hit your profile page, where they can check out your content and follow your brand.

Your website footer is one great spot to add social profile links, as are blog posts. You’ll also want to consider adding a link to your Pinterest page in your marketing emails. For example, women’s fashion brand Modern Citizen includes a link to its Pinterest, as well as other social profiles, right beneath its newsletter signup form.

10. Keep an eye on your Pinterest analytics

When growth is your goal, numbers are your friend. There are a few ways you can identify new avenues to grow your account using Pinterest’s analytics.

Pinterest will show you which of your pins are performing best over a specific period of time on three different core metrics: impressions, saves, and clicks. These three numbers can help you figure out which pin styles and types of content are performing the best with your existing audience.

• Pins with high impressions are getting seen by a lot of people, but if the other two numbers are low, it’s not driving them to take action.
• Pins with high saves are getting repinned by your audience, but if the number of clicks is low, it’s not driving anyone to your website, where you can convert them.
• Pins with high clicks are delivering the goods. They’re getting people to your website, but if they’re not getting impressions, you’re missing out on web traffic.

Here’s an example:

There are two pins you’d want to examine further here.

The first one is the pin with over 1,000 impressions, but only 10 clicks. You could try optimizing the image and the description to increase traffic to your website, and you can look at which boards it’s on to figure out why it’s getting so many impressions.

The second is the pin that got 28 clicks. Take a look at the image, the description, and the headline. This pin is clearly resonating well with your existing audience—how can you make more like this one, or get more impressions for this pin?

Beyond just Pinterest’s tools, you can also make sure that your pins use UTM tagged links, so you can track their performance in your Google Analytics account.

Adjust as needed

These growth tactics are a good place to start if you’re looking to grow your Pinterest account, but your mileage with each one may vary based on your content and your brand. As with any new marketing tactic, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the results and use what you’re learning to optimize your efforts.