Growing your Pinterest- not just another update. good info

byNickiD

1.4K followers

10 years ago

Good Sunday morning!

I'm officially no longer mass following. I updated earlier in the week that I was still growing steady without doing the mass following and have decided to keep on this way.

Why would I choose to grow slow and steady vs rapid and inconsistent? Well, friends... following a bunch of random people has consequences.

First, it muddies up my newsfeed with a bunch of crappy pins I don't want to see. My husband and I share our social media channels (although he doesn't use Pinterest as often as facebook) and you can imagine his surprise when he got on to look at deck ideas but found a ton of naked people. I spend time on Pinterest every single day. I don't need my husband thinking I have a porn addiction when I don't. lol

It took over a week to unfollow all the 'porn pinners'. Yes, you can report them to Pinterest, and probably should since it's against their policies...but it's really quite exhausting to do all that extra work. I found it easier to stop mass following and just unfollow anyone pinning stuff I don't need on my feed.

Porn isn't the only undesirable newsfeed mud. I have found legions of teenage 'fandom' pins that I find extremely annoying, along with countless items that just don't fit in any of my boards.

This is what it really boils down to... I don't have time to wade through a mile of worthless newsfeed to get to the one pin I want to see. And that, my friends, is when I stopped mass following.

Your newsfeed should be filled with pins that you want on your boards. This makes your morning and evening pinfest quick and easy. With that said, I do believe the mass following has a place.

Stick with me here...

Without mass following, I would still have only a few followers. I know that I NEED followers in order to get my own pins traffic, which leads to blog traffic, which leads to making money.

So, what do I recommend now that I have exprienced the negative aspects? I stand by my advice. The only change would be to mass follow cautiously until you have a few thousand followers. From there, you can weed out the undesired and just regularly pin your way to a ton of followers.

4k followers seems to be a magic number. As long as I pin every day (sometimes I only pin morning or night and know I should improve) my numbers keep climbing. I am growing by 50-100 followers per day. That's pretty respectable. This is considered the 'organic' way to grow your following. The bonus is that you will quickly have more followers than following.

WHY is this important?

There are certain advertisers and ad revenue companies that are very desirable for pinners and website owners to have, but they won't touch you if your following is higher than your followers. For many that I have seen, the magic distance between the two is 1000. I am currently researching an article that details these companies and gives the pros and cons. So far, I have found it important enough to quit mass following and allow my organic followers to grow past my following...

I'll keep you updated as always!

Best wishes:)

-Nicki