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How important are Pinterest Followers? (A Very Important Discovery)

Enstine Muki

Are Pinterest followers important?

On Pinterest, we have both Board and Account following and people can choose to simply follow your account or just follow one or more of your boards.

Boards are like your account segments and each board is further broken into Sections.

Your home feed (Smart Feed) shows Pins from people and boards that you follow, plus Pins inspired by your boards and recent activity.

But is it that important to care about your number of followers?

It’s two months today I have been pinning more consistently. I have created pins for some old evergreen posts and seen them breathe more healthily.

I do create pins for new posts as well and have read a bunch of Pinterest tips posts. I believe I’m now better at the game. But a lot is still to be discovered.

Consistency has grown my follower base from 957 last month to 1.9k today, in just a month.

But before I share with you an important discovery about Pinterest Following and Pinterest SEO, here are a couple of points that attract my focus about this traffic platform:

Now, if you are reading and trying to improve your pin performance, these are the core areas discussed in most of the articles out there. But are they all important? Which of these deserve more of your attention?

Well, I won’t get into details of all these parts. Let’s focus on your followers now.

Pinterest Followers

Like any other social media platform, your followers on Pinterest are members who can easily find your pins, generally on their Smart Feed. The Smart Feed is the Pinterest Home Page once you are logged in. The content differs from pinner to pinner, depending on their interest and those they follow.

So one may think that the more your followers, the more your exposure and traffic. All things being equal, that reasoning is correct.

But …

Pinterest is shifting from being a social network.

That means a lot if you want to see success on Pinterest. Shifting away from being a social platform means Pinterest is turning resources to something else called Visual search engine!

Yes Pinterest is a search engine. Unlike Google where we have keywords, SERP Titles and Meta Descriptions, Pinterest has more elements that affect CTR. These are:

So if Pinterest is giving importance to its search capacity, is it still important to lay emphasis on followers? What is the relationship between Search and Following ?

A very important discovery

Let me share with you what I discovered. I haven’t read this from Pinterest blog or from somewhere. You may have a better explanation or maybe have a document somewhere with clearer notes.

I ran a reach on Pinterest with the select option “All Pins”

The entries on this result page were from folks I follow on the platform. As I scrolled further, I began seeing results from people I do not follow.

I wanted to find out more. So I switched the select option to “People”

Again, the first four lines on the result page were all Pinners I follow. From the fifth page, I started seeing folks I do not follow.

I did same with the “Boards” option and the results were same. This brings me to the conclusion that Pinterest followers are still important.

Please take note

The keyword I used is actually one of my niche keywords. So definitely, most of the people I follow have optimized their profiles and boards for that keyword.

That should explain why content was pulled from my following.

I went ahead and used a completely strange keyword: “Weight Lose”

As expected, I had tons of entries on the result page but not of them was from my followers.

Does not mean anything?

The more followers you get, the more Pinterest SEO works for you.

Pinterest Followers are important

People who follow you are more likely to search for something you’ve shared on the platform. Therefore, if you want your pins to rank on top of Pinterest SERP for more searches, you’ll have to get more relevant followers.

We’ve seen from the simple discovery above that the accounts and boards you follow are a ranking factor.

Despite the keyword optimization, (for the most part) Pinterest algorithm will have to first of all tap into your following each time you run a search to get the best results before spreading across other boards and accounts.

While you get traffic from your followers’ Smart Feed, you also draw traffic from their search result pages.

More followers, more re-pins, more traffic.

Pinterest has the re-pin (Save) feature which is like Share on Facebook and Retweet on Twitter.  This allows your followers and others who find your pins through search to save your pins in their own boards.

Added to the Save button is the Send command which allows people to send your pins to others on the same platform.

But this seems to be the most underutilized feature on the platform. While I have never received a pin, those I have sent out have not had any feedback.

Getting more Pinterest followers

Now we’ve established that getting followed on Pinterest is important for exposure and traffic. But how do you attract more followers?

  1. Use a clean profile picture
  2. Describe your profile properlly
  3. Create more niche boards
  4. Follower others
  5. Pin consistently
  6. Re-pin useful posts
  7. Share your Pinterest account URL on your blog. (Follow me here)
  8. Join Pinterest groups on Facebook and be useful
  9. Etc

Thanks for reading and kindly share on social media or save for later on Pinterest:

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