Why followers don't matter on Pinterest
Photo by Nathan Dumlao.
On social media channels such as Instagram or Facebook, you are probably working hard on growing your number of followers. Not only that, it may even be one of the most important metrics to pay attention to. The reason for that is simple - the more followers you have, the more people will see your posts.
The pressure to build your following gets even bigger once you realize that not all of your followers actually see your posts. If you check your analytics, you will be able to see that on average, about half of your following doesn't see a majority of posts you publish. This number varies for each account, and there are several ways how to improve it, but that is not why you are here for. You want to find out why on Pinterest, followers are not something you should be paying too much attention to.
There is a lot of differences between Instagram and Pinterest, and one of the biggest ones is surely the difference between how many people your posts can reach. Let me give you a concrete example.
If you have 1000 followers on Instagram, somewhere between 400-700 people will see your posts. That includes your followers and other Instagram users you can reach otherwise (through hashtags, location tags etc).
If you have 1000 followers on Pinterest, it's not that uncommon for your pin to reach 2000 people or more. Let me point out here that I'm not talking about viral content. This can be true for quite an averagely performing pin - when your pin does go viral, it can reach thousands, even hundreds of thousands, no matter how many followers you have.
What metrics to focus on instead?
Of course, it doesn't hurt to grow your Pinterest following, but when evaluating your page's success, there are other more important metrics to focus on. As a Pinterest manager, I am mostly paying attention to the number of clicks and number of saves my clients' receive. The first one is important because the more people visit their website, the better the chance of conversion. The second tells me how useful or relevant the content is. If it gets a lot of saves, it means that it's interesting to our target audience, if not, that's a signal that we should change something.
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