How to Achieve Explosive Growth on Pinterest: 8 Key Ways to Build and Multiply Your Audience

Before he became the co-founder of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann moved to California and started working for Google in customer support before eventually starting a business.

He says, of his then move from Des Moines, Iowa, to the Valley:

Being close to people that inspire you is a very good first step.

Fittingly, that’s exactly what his company, Pinterest, now makes possible: Allowing people to get close to the brands, products, and people who inspire them.

With Pinterest now accounting for 25% of retail referral traffic and driving four times more money per click than Twitter, Pinterest has proven its power as a massively effective place to connect with your audience. And many brands are considering whether they need to give their Pinterest marketing a bit of a push.

Are you one of them?

I collected data on how best to answer the question of whether Pinterest is a good fit for you and, if it is, how to grow your brand visibility and audience reach through the platform.

Ready to start building your brand on Pinterest? Let’s talk about some ideas that may work for you.

Is Pinterest the Right Social Media Fit for Your Brand?

Before we talk about growing your audience, however, one of the most important questions to ask for any business or brand is: Is our audience worth growing on Pinterest?

As of April 2015, Pinterest had 72.8 million users, with 85% of them being women. In fact, looking at the statistics, you can see why Pinterest is a social network that most businesses cannot afford to ignore and may even need to take precedence over all your other social media marketing.

• Percentage of all US social media users that use Pinterest: 30%
• Percentage of Pinterest users that are from outside the U.S.: 40%
• Pinterest’s growth in users outside the U.S. in 2014: 135%
• Average time spent on Pinterest per visit: 14.2 minutes

Here are some questions that might help in making that decision:

1. Are You Already Getting Pinterest Traffic?

Before you do anything else, get a hold of your Google analytics traffic stats and look through quickly to see if you’re getting any referral traffic already through Pinterest.

A good way to do this is to follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Scroll down the left-hand menu and look for the option titled “Acquisition.” Click on it to open up a sub-menu.
3. Select “Overview.” You’ll see a pie-chart detailing which percentage of your users is coming from Organic Search, Referrals, Direct, Social, etc.
4. In the list at the bottom of the page, you’ll see all the different sources of your traffic. Click on Social.
5. This will open up another list that will show you, in numbers, how much referral traffic you received from each social media channel in the last month. Do you spot Pinterest anywhere?

You might be surprised by how many people are already pinning images from your website or blog.

While this is especially true for businesses that place a high value on images, such as those in retail, fashion, food, and travel, I was quite surprised to find that I already had a Pinterest audience in the high hundreds for my own business, which caters to freelance writers.

2. Do You Have Visual Elements to Your Business or Can You Introduce Some?

Like I mentioned above, Pinterest brings obvious benefits to businesses that are big on visual content, but creative and out-of-the-box thinking can help you find innovative ways of communicating with your audience even if you’re in the service sector or have a business (such as insurance) that doesn’t directly translate to a visual medium.

For instance, many authors create Pinterest boards with book cover images or images they find during research for their novels. Freelancers share neat home office spaces.

3. Do You Have a Constant Stream of Good Images Coming Through or Do You Have the Resources to Create Them?

Creating images centered around your brand takes time, focus, and a lot of thought. If you’re a one-person brand currently focusing on sales and strategy, it may not be the right time for you to be putting all that effort into creating original images.

Does your company have the resources to create a constant stream of images or the funds to hire out this part of the process? If not, it might be a better idea to wait until you do.

4. How Much Do You Care?

Finally, no matter your business—visual or not—if you’re interested in using the visual medium to further your brand, you can push through all the hurdles and bottlenecks and make your brand shine.

Good questions to ask are: How much time do you spend on Pinterest? Are you often curating images in your head? Do you look at boards from other brands and have ideas on how to make them better? If you answered yes to those questions, you should be on Pinterest.

How to Massively Grow Your Audience

1. Pin Consistently and Frequently

As with most other social networks, consistent and frequent sharing can often be the key to building an audience and keeping them engaged with your content.

Timing can be important, too, though with global audiences, it’s often better to spread your content out over a span of the whole 24 hours so you’re leaving out people in other time zones. This exposes you to more of your audience more frequently and often leads to more pins, shares, and comments as a result.

With frequency, more is often better, we find, with 5x a day being optimal. Some experts recommend as much as 15-20 times a day, but if you’re a small company or brand, it’s better to pick a lower number and stay consistent than to do higher numbers intermittently.

Source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/achieve-explosive-growth-pinterest-8-key-ways-build-multiply-audience/140541/