How to Growth Hack Pinterest
Note: This is one of the chapters of Secret Sauce: A Step-By-Step Guide to Growth Hacking. If you find this valuable, please check it out — we have dissected every network and platform the same way you see Pinterest dissected here.
Pinterest is Different
Pinterest is a little bit unlike the other networks we’ve seen; it’s not necessarily a social network like Facebook or Twitter, yet it’s also not purely a discovery platform like Reddit. It’s kind of a combination of the two.
The average Pinterest may use the platform as a way to save a collage of things they like, planning what clothes to buy when shopping, deciding what meals to cook, daydreaming, planning weddings (real or imagined), setting goals, as well as a method of discovery not unlike a search engine.
For example, if you want to find pictures of white sneakers that look good with jeans, there’s no better “search engine” out there for this type of content.
That’s a lot to wrap our minds around from a growth perspective, but allow us to make one suggestion that will help determine how we should use Pinterest; think of it as a discovery engine.
Pinterest — the ultimate discovery engine
Now this may not be true for 100% of users; certainly there are some that are going out, finding, and pinning original content. But controlling that process is much more difficult — there’s only so much we can do about getting influencers to pin our stuff as opposed to pinning others’. (That’s not entirely true, but we’ll get into the nuance of that later).
What we can, control to some degree, however, is what happens once pins and users are actually on the platform.
Note that as we go through this exercise we hope to see the wheels turning in your heads, instead of just reading and learning. You should start to be able to look at situations and networks and dissect them for yourselves at this point, even though it’s still pretty early.
The Two Things
As you’ll remember from the Instagram chapter, after we have our target audience carefully selected we want to determine two things:
- Where our selected audience goes
- How to interact with them in a non-intrusive way
Because we’re already looking at this network we’ll just assume that your audience is one that is active on Pinterest, and will focus mainly with point number two.
As we do, let’s list all possible interactions you can have on the Pinterest platform in which we can come in contact with another user.
- We can repin what others have pinned (could be interesting, but we’re not sure how yet)
- We can follow other accounts or boards (think back to the Twitter chapter and you should instantly see how we can use this — reaching out using following to make a touch point)
- We can “like” pins
- We can comment
With those touch points we can put together a pretty straight-forward strategy for getting people to find our pins, just like we did on Twitter and Instagram — maybe we’re going to follow a lot of people and like some of their pins to make them notice us. Maybe we’re going to create boards full of beautiful pins, and encourage others to follow our boards by pinning their content.
Those strategies definitely work, but we can look at Pinterest just a little bit differently, because it is a discovery engine in addition to its social properties.
Pinterest Discovery
In interest of learning a little bit more about Pinterest, why don’t you go to the search bar and enter “white sneakers.”
You’ll see something like this, though Pinterest redesigns this so frequently that the design in the below screenshot could be outdated by the time I finish this sentence.
You’ll notice a few things:
First, the top results tend to be those with a lot of repins in a short amount of time. This makes sense, as Pinterest is going to want to bring its best results to the top.
Also of note, however, is that Pinterest is already guessing things like “Mens” based on my profile history and past behavior.
Pinterest is smart, and it does a phenomenal job of guessing what you would like.
If you want proof of that, try creating a fresh Pinterest account, pinning a few topics that you’re interested, and not following anybody. You’ll notice that after a couple of days Pinterest starts to fill up your feed with pins that you are really interested in, and often pins that you do like, even if they’re from outside your network.
That is the game we want to win, and doing so is shockingly simple.
Step One: Making Our Pins Repinnable
The first step to making the pins of your product is almost stupid because of how simple it is, but it works so we won’t complain.
When you pin something for the first time you can attach a comment, and that comment generally remains with the pin.
For example, one of the first results when I search “chicken dinner” is this
You can see the description pulled from the website: “Skillet chicken with creamy cilantro lime sauce,” the number of pins (377.7k!) the pinner, the source, and some other information.
But what we really want to focus on in this instance is “Seriously simple dinner! Crispy skillet chicken in the most…”
That is a comment that the first or last person to pin this pin gave it.
Now note the almost tacit endorsement that this pin carries: “Seriously simple!”
This dinner indeed looks delicious, but you’ll notice that almost every top pin contains an endorsement like this pin does. If it’s a recipe the comment will be, “We make this all the time and it’s amazing!” If it’s an outfit it will say, “So cute!” This commentary serves as an endorsement of the content itself, and remains attached to the content.
So how do we manipulate that in our favor? It’s simple:
- Look through the top pins in your category or of your topic to see what comments seem to trigger more repins.
- When you’re pinning, make sure to include similar endorsements as the comment portion of the pin.
Well that’s just fine, you may say, but how does that help me make my pins popular? I don’t have a big following, and I can’t force thousands of pins.
First, make sure you are interacting, following, and otherwise rubbing Pinterest shoulders with as many people as you possibly can.
Second, we’re going to cheat.
Pinterest Group Boards
Pinterest Group Boards were originally designed to let a few family members or friends pin a board together. When I got married, for example, my wife and I shared a board with wedding plans, and when one of my wife’s sisters became involved enough they were also invited to pin on the board.
When you’re invited to pin on a board the pins from that board flow into your feed.
When group boards first rolled out, a few enterprising individuals realized that Pinterest had inadvertently created a loophole — you could invite anyone to pin on your board, even if you weren’t friends and didn’t follow each other. And here’s the kicker — when they booted the people that had accepted the invitation to pin, those people still followed the group board.
In other words, I could invite you to pin on my board, kick you off, and virtually force my pins directly into your feed.
Now, of course, after a while Pinterest closed this loophole, making it so that you could only invite people who follow you to pin, but in the meantime the group boards exploded in popularity.
They are still around today, and can be used with incredible efficiency for the few people who know about them.
Group Board Etiquette
Each group board is a little bit different, but in general there are a lot of people who have been given permission to pin, a much larger number who are following, and various rules around how to be added to pin or how one is removed.
In order to be added to a board we have to make our account look very legitimate — the more tasteful the better, then follow the instructions on the board itself.
Usually if you have a good looking account and ask the board owner to invite you you will receive an invitation.
Additionally, on some boards anyone who has been invited to pin can invite anyone else. For those boards you can usually find someone who has access and negotiate a trade of some sort, especially if you have access to pin on a group board that they want.
Once you are invited to pin on those boards, so long as you don’t become overly spammy (be careful there — many will ensure that you’re not just pinning products from one company) you can pin on that board indefinitely, at times showing your pins to as many as hundreds of thousands of people.
Some of the bigger boards will move quickly, so you’ll have to be more active, but there’s no doubt that those pins are seen. And when they’re seen and pinned they can drive traffic and sales for a long, long time. Pinterest content has a long shelf life.
Finding Group Boards
Well that’s great, but how do we find these group boards?
Finding group boards used to be a huge pain — there was no way other than to stumble upon them by jumping around from popular pin to popular pin.
That’s still not a bad way to find them — it’s pretty likely that popular pins have been on a group board at one time or another — but recently someone started collecting all of them, turning them into a searchable, indexed directory called PinGroupie.
There you can sort by any way you would want.
If it were my first time looking for a group board, I would first navigate to my category of choice, then sort by “repins p.1” which means repins on the first page.
Generally speaking, the more repins there are on the first page the more active of an audience a board has.
And there you have it, the dead simple, incredibly effective way to make your product explode on Pinterest.
- Create a very legitimate and active account, constantly interacting with others in your space.
- Create great pins with a tacit endorsement comment
- Join group boards (by invitation or board swap) and leverage those audiences as best as you can.
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