How We Doubled our Pinterest Followers Last Year

Find out how we doubled our Pinterest followers this year, so you can too!

Affiliate links are included in this post.  When you purchase using our link, we may receive some type of monetary compensation.  Thank you!

We’ve been blogging for close to four years now, and we’ve seen social media platforms come and go.  As a blogger, you just never know which platform will do well for you, which will be a flop, or which will disappear overnight, so you have to try to engage in all of them.

Lucy, Kerry, and I all had Pinterest accounts prior to blogging, so it was a platform that we already enjoyed.  We pinned for fun.  So when we started blogging, we just transferred that love of pinning over into our blog Pinterest account.

It wasn’t a terrible strategy.  We grew followers, and we were getting traffic from those followers.  And really, the traffic is the main point, right?  You can have a million followers, but if they never visit your blog it doesn’t really help you much. 

As we got busier and busier, we had to find ways to do things better and more efficiently, so we started using Tailwind to schedule our pins.  At first, we weren’t really paying attention to how that was working.  But lately I’ve had a lot of other bloggers asking about Tailwind, so I started looking into our numbers, and I have to admit I was shocked (in a good way)!

We started out 2016 with 8564 Pinterest followers.  Not that bad!  And at the beginning of 2016 we were getting about 1/4 of our traffic from Pinterest.

I just pulled the numbers up to the end of 2016, and we now have 17,138 Pinterest followers!  That means we doubled our followers in a year!  And we are also now up to about 40% of our traffic coming from Pinterest.

So how did we do it?

Well obviously we blog amazing things and only pin the best, right?  hehehe.  I’d like to think that’s true, but I also believe that Tailwind has been partly responsible for the increase.

By using Tailwind, we are pinning regularly.  Not a ton of pins one day and nothing the next like we were doing when we manually pinned.  Instead, I can sit down and schedule out all of our pins for the upcoming week, and have them pin throughout the day, every day.

I think this is especially helpful for Sundays.  I don’t usually have a ton of time to pin on Sundays, and yet that is the day that we normally see our biggest traffic surge from Pinterest.  It was the such a bummer to keep missing out on that traffic when we were manually pinning.  Now I can have pins set up throughout the day, even while I’m at church and unable to pin.

So if you want to get started with Tailwind and gain more Pinterest followers as well, here are some awesome tips to get you started in the right direction.

Create Board Lists

Making board lists is awesome!  You can group together all the boards that are similar, so that you can tell Tailwind to pin a pin to all of those boards. 

For example, we have a list of dessert boards, a list of kid boards, and a list of dinner boards.  These are topics where we are part of a lot of group boards, so the lists have really made it so much more manageable to make sure we’re pinning our content to the places it ought to go.

Set Interval Pinning

I don’t want to pin my Chicken Green Bean Stuffing Casserole to every single one of our dinner boards at the exact same time.  That would seem super spammy, to me.  Instead I can tell Tailwind to pin to these boards every so many hours.  For example, I might set it to pin every 16 hours, or every 2 days.  Then at each time during that interval, it will pin to the next board in the list.

Interval pinning is awesome for new blog posts.  Once a post is live, I go into it and set up interval pinning for every board we have that is relevant to the post.  Then I know that pinning that post is covered, and it took me only a minute.

Use Tribes

Tribes is a fabulous new feature.  You can be added to tribes, or you can even start your own.  Tribes offer an easy place to go to get other bloggers’ content. 

We try to schedule about 50% of our own content and 50% of other bloggers’ content.  Rather than trying to hunt down content, I can go into my tribes and quickly add content to pin to my boards.

So what are you waiting for?  If you haven’t tried Tailwind before and you’re thinking now is the time, you can click through this link to try it free for a month, and if you join you’ll get $15 towards a plus account. 

We definitely feel like Tailwind has been worth our money.  If not only for the time saving aspect of it, but definitely for the fact that we’ve doubled our Pinterest followers!

Why not join us on Pinterest: Coffee With Us 3  or hangout with us on Facebook:  

Check out our link parties.

Don’t forget to pin!

Save