Find It Friday – How To Get More Followers On Pinterest

This is a question that I’m being asked frequently during training sessions and being asked ‘How can I get more followers on pinterest’ in a tweet the other evening, I decided to devote the topic to a post as the answer is a lot longer than 140 characters!

How To Get More Followers On Pinterest:

1. Follow Me: Add the ‘follow me on pinterest’ button to the sidebar of your blog or on your website.
2. Email: You could add it to the signature of your emails too.
3. Facebook connections: If you log in with facebook, pinterest flags your account to those friends already on pinterest so most will start to follow you immediately.
4. Facebook & Twitter: Sync your pinterest account with your twitter and facebook accounts (bear in mind, you can only sync it to your personal facebook account, not a business page) but don’t overdo the pinning to twitter or facebook. Little and often!
5. Personality & Great Pins: Before you start following lots of people that you don’t know, spend some time setting up some boards and some great pins which others might be interested in repinning and which show your personality.  Think about what your potential customers are interested in e.g. if you are selling vacuum cleaners that are great for getting rid of pet hair, then create a board for cute dogs. If you are selling kitchen sinks, pinning pictures of amazing kitchens in different styles should attract those planning a new kitchen.
6. Good Quality Pictures: Always pin pictures with a wow quality – be they your own or other images.  Poor photography just won’t be repinned nor will it impress.
7. Keywords: Think about how you name your boards – using keywords if possible.  The same goes for your pins and descriptors. Look at the most popular pins on repinly and see how they are named.
8. Boards – Remember to re-arrange your boards. Move seasonal ones to the bottom of the page e.g. Easter and vary other boards around every now and then too. Do Not have Christmas boards at the top of your page in February (yes, I’ve seen plenty of them).
9. Follow other people.  The easiest way to follow people with similar interests is to look at the top right hand corner on the profile of someone you are following and you’ll see the accounts they have pinned from. The follow button is right beside their name and avatar.
10. Look at Ratio: If you want most of the people to follow you back, choose those who have an almost equal number of ‘following’ as they have ‘followers’.  Don’t expect someone with thousands of followers who is only following 60 people to follow you back.
11. Comment on other pins and use the @username if you want to bring someone else’s attention to that pin.  People will respond to comments (and follow back) but I’ve noticed not that many people are commenting on pins.
12. Hashtags: You can use hashtags in your description (but don’t overdo it – apply the same rules as to twitter as a tweet or description filled with hashtags makes many people want to reach for the ‘unfollow’ button)
13. Pay: You can buy Pinterest followers but I always think that the followers will come if the content is good.
14. Pin regularly, some say anything between 5-30 pins a day is recommended. I’d suggest little and often. I don’t like going to my pinterest page and seeing it full of the same type of pins from one user. You can schedule pinning now on pingraphy (still in beta phase though and like pinerly, it doesn’t display the name of the website you pinned from. It doesn’t offer GMT as a time zone yet either)
15. 80:20 rule:  Pin some of your own content but also pin from other sources too, rather than just repinning all the other content. Be original! Aim to have about 20% of your own content within your pins.
16. Pinning buddies:  No harm setting up a pinning relationship with a friend whereby you pin some content from their website and they pin from yours (if that fits in with your boards). Then, both of you get double exposure.
17. Use Pinerly:  Having signed up to pinerly, I was invited to submit my details and am now listed there as a ‘suggested follow’. However, I haven’t noticed an influx of followers from it as yet.
18. Shared boards: Creating and becoming members of shared boards and pinning to them means that you and your pins get more exposure (and more followers).  I pinned a number of ‘pinterest blog posts’ to a shared ‘Pinterest Day’ board yesterday and received more followers immediately.

Remember Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are hugely popular pinterest accounts so do give it some time. Pinterest is one way to increase your brand awareness and then, to build on sales. Like all the social media platforms, it takes time and good content.

If you have any questions or comments regarding your own pinterest account, do share them in the comment box.

Are you on Pinterest? Do connect with me there.

How to Create ‘Long, Tall & Skinny’ Photos for Pinterest

In our last post, we talked about how creating an extra wide photograph for your facebook page can really highlight that photograph and status. In this post, I’m going to show you how to create a long, tall and skinny photograph for pinterest and why this is a good idea.

Photos on pinterest are all the same width which is predetermined by Pinterest and your photographs will fit into that scale. However, photographs can be as long as they like so a long, tall, skinny photo will gain more attention on the pinterest page – this is why infographics are long and narrow.

You may notice too that tutorials such as how to create a complicated french plait, will show a series of photographs collaged into a single long image and while I’m not going to suggest to try to make every photo you pin a long, tall and skinny photo, it is a good idea to do so occasionally.

‘Before and after’ photographs are perfect for this, as are tutorials as I mentioned above if you can take a series of photographs to show progress.

Here’s how to do it by using pic monkey first to create the collage:

Choose the collage layout you would like to use on the left. Decide how many photos you would like to use. In this example, I am showing one ‘before’ and one ‘after’ so I choose the number with the least number of boxes – 3.

When you first upload the photos, they will go into a box on the left so it is simply a case of moving them across with the cursor. You may find that the photo is off centre as you can see in the top example below but you can still move around the photo to centre the object.

As you can see below, the chair has now been centred. Next – I want to get rid of the third box which is surplus, plus I want the photo to be long and narrow so I click on the little ‘x’ in the top right hand corner and it disappears.

You can see below that the removal of the box on the left hasn’t changed the dimensions of the overall collage which as stayed at 1024 x 1024 hence the photo itself has become skewed in scale plus I want to create a long tall skinny photo!

What you need to do next is move the cursor in on the sides of the boxed collage until you are happy with the scale and your photo is long, tall and skinny!

Then, save it to your blog post and you’ll see on this post how I created two collages but really, for pinterest, the long image is the best.  Pin it and see it on the pinterest page.

There you have it – all the tips you need to create long, tall and skinny photos for pinterest – particularly useful for showing ‘before and after’ shots or tutorials.  We offer tutorials in how to use pinterest effectively for your business so do get in contact if you would like to book one.

Pinterest: SEO Benefits of Naming Photographs

You have probably heard of the SEO benefits of naming your photographs properly for your blog or website. With the increased use of Pinterest, it makes even more sense to name your photographs effectively.

If you hover your mouse over a photograph, the name of the photograph appears.  All too often, the name of the photograph is something like 04578373.jpg or IMG9873.jpg.  Google cannot read images, hence each one of your pictures should have a name that includes your keyword.  For example, If you wish to sell your recipe book, your photograph of brown bread should be named brown bread recipe. Every photograph should have a relevant name and yes, it does take time to rename them.

It is also a good idea to name the photograph in the title and ‘alt tag’ part of uploading your photograph to your blog. (See our post on how to upload a photograph to your blog)  The Alternate Tag is the keyphrase that displays when someone hovers over the photo.

There are now other benefits to naming your photographs properly. More and more people are using pinterest, they are either pinning photographs by having the ‘pin it’ button on the top of their screen or they can use the ‘pin it’ button on your blog post if you have installed a plugin (see my ‘pin it’ button at the top of each Garrendenny Lane blog post).

When they pin your photograph, the name you gave that photograph in your Alt Tag will show up in the description for the pin – this means that unless the pinner changes it, your keyword within your description will remain with the photograph. If you have used a well optimised keyword, it should show up in searches and receive repins and hence, drive more traffic back to your website.

If the pinner has their account linked to twitter or chooses to tweet the pin, that description will also be tweeted with the link.  I’ve noticed that most people tend to leave the description, adding their own opinion to it such as ‘Love this’ or ‘ perfect for my child’s bedroom’ etc.

Remember that the description doesn’t just have to be factual, it can be a compelling description too.

We are planning to teach various courses on pinterest in the autumn so do let us know if you’d be interested and we’ll post up the details once we have the dates.  I will be presenting on the topic of pinterest at our next KLCK bloggers network meeting in Kilkenny on 9th July if you would like to come along.