I’ve already admitted where I went wrong with Pinterest. It’s a powerful marketing tool that I straight up ignored for far too long. (it’s also apparently great for travel)
When researching effective Pinterest marketing strategies, one thing became clear. The most valuable feature of Pinterest is Group Boards.
Pinterest allows you to pin things you’ve found all over the internet into virtual boards. It’s a great way to organize your creative ideas and inspirations.
When people follow you on Pinterest, each pin you make to one of your boards shows up in their main feed. But Pinterest lets you follow individual boards as well. This is especially valuable when you come across a user who has some boards you’re interested in, but others you couldn’t care less about.
I’m in the entrepreneurship and online marketing niche. When I find someone who posts about that, I want to follow it. But people have a wide variety of interests, and will have other boards on completely unrelated topics. (as they should)
By default, only you can post to your Pinterest boards.
But Pinterest Group Boards allow you to invite others to join your board and pin content relevant to the featured topic.
Because Group Boards have multiple users pinning regular content, they tend to gain a lot of followers very quickly. Like this one:
Do you know how much time and money it would take to gain 17,000 followers on any social media platform? How would you like to gain those followers instantly instead?
Pinterest lets you do that with Group Boards.
So, how can you join these high traffic Group Boards?
How NOT to find high quality Pinterest Group Boards
I’ve seen a lot of bloggers and business owners recommend using tools like PinGroupie to find Group Boards. It’s a directory of Pinterest Group Boards with a lot of followers and collaborators.
While this is definitely a good place to start, you’re going to quickly outgrow the types of groups that are listed in these directories.
As an example, I ran a search for Pinterest Group Boards with the most collaborators in the Travel category. Here’s what it came up with: (with my own annotations)
Out of the top 10 Group Boards, only 2 are worth your time. The rest are full of spam, unrelated content, or have very low engagement.
Another problem: this directory is not kept up to date. The last time any of these Group Boards were crawled for new content was 7 months ago. A lot can change in 7 months.
So, let’s try doing things a bit differently.
How to ACTUALLY Find High Quality Pinterest Group Boards
We’re still going to start with PinGroupie, but then we’re going to venture out on our own and do some exploring.
Remember, we still managed to find 2 decent Group Boards up there. Let’s check out one of them, “The World is Yours“.
Any decent Pinterest Group Board should meet this criteria:
- A large amount of followers
- High engagement
- Clear instructions on how to join
In this case, The World is Yours has nearly 5,000 followers, decent engagement on pins, and clearly describes how you can join. But it only seems to have 2 collaborators.
It’s decent, but I think we can do better…
Every Pinterest Group Board will show a preview of some of the collaborators just under the “Follow Board” button. The Group Board owner will always be the profile that is first listed, or on the far left.
Let’s check out who owns this Group Board.
We’ve now confirmed that the user is in our niche, and has a good size following.
In order to build a large amount of followers, there’s a very good chance that the user has joined some Group Boards themselves. Let’s browse through their profile and see if we can find which boards they’re a part of.
Group Boards look different from regular boards. They display a large circle with some of the collaborators inside of it, like so:
Let’s scroll down and see what we can find…
JACK POT!
This is all I could fit in one screenshot. This user is a collaborator on DOZENS of quality Group Boards. Many of them even have 10,000’s of pins, so you know there’s a solid chance that they have a ton of followers.
Let’s take a look at the “Our Amazing World” Group Board:
BINGO.
We would definitely want to be a part of this Group Board. All you have to do at this point is follow the board owner’s instructions to join. (if they aren’t too much for you, some board owners can demand a lot)
Once they’ve added you to their Group Board, you can share all of your pins with the 30,000 people who follow that board!
And just like that, you’ve instantly gained 30,000 followers.
You can now repeat this process until you’re a collaborator with many high quality boards.
Pinterest Group boards are a massive opportunity to gain rapid exposure for your brand and posts. Don’t ignore it like I did. Use this simple guide, and you’ll be a Pinterest master in no time.
