9 Practical Ways To Leverage Pinterest To Expand Your Instagram Audience In 2022
Instagram is now a key element for many businesses’ marketing strategy, which is why knowing how to grow your Instagram using Pinterest has such a high importance.
Many brands’ social presence is reliant on being able to get more followers on Instagram to drive profitable traffic to landing pages, grow conversions, and create an engaged, loyal audience. Getting more Instagram followers or even just understanding how to reach Instagram audiences effectively isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, but an often overlooked way of doing so is to use Pinterest to drive traffic on Instagram itself. Thanks to its link-friendly nature, Pinterest is a great opportunity for increasing referral traffic, in turn leading to better engagement levels and eventually, more followers.
With over 1 billion monthly users, a smart algorithm, and many creative accounts already established, Instagram is a competitive place that is only going to get more crowded. However, when it comes down to businesses, the number of followers you have can basically mean nothing if it doesn’t represent an engaged audience looking to make purchases, and advocates for your brand online. So it isn’t just about building a bigger audience, but in fact, a bigger engaged community. To start building your presence up the right way on Instagram, here’s how Pinterest can help.
Why Should You Focus On Instagram?
Instagram has become a serious content marketing outlet for selling, networking and cultivating an audience for individuals and brands alike. It’s one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet, with over 200 million active monthly members sharing 60 million images and 1.6 billion likes per day. Put simply, it’s where everyone already is.
But it goes beyond just sweeping numbers as engagement rates for brands on most social networks is less than 0.1%, on Instagram meanwhile it’s an entirely different story. According to recent studies, the average Instagram engagement rate for brands was 58 times higher than on Facebook. This makes it a key pillar for not just your online presence, but your online marketing. So now you know why you need to reach this audience, it’s important to understand exactly how to grow your Instagram using Pinterest.
9 Ways To Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic On Instagram
Pinterest is often overlooked when brands are considering social media platforms to focus on, but it really shouldn’t be. As a platform, it has 300 million global monthly active users, 83% of which are weekly Pinners who have made a purchase based on content they saw on Pinterest.. These stats illustrate that if you can tap into the platform’s massive and engaged user base, you can then influence purchasing decisions. So how do you do this?
1. Claim Your IG Account
Firstly, claiming your Instagram account on Pinterest. This comes with many benefits as you now get access to more robust analytics and attribution for any Pins originating from Instagram. Once you claim your Instagram account, your Pinterest profile will be displayed on any Pins from your company Instagram page. Basically, this means that if you or anyone else creates a Pin using content from your claimed Instagram account, your profile picture and a “Follow” button will appear above that Pin. This helps acquire more monthly viewers to your Pinterest profile as well as subsequent click-throughs to your curated Instagram profile.
2. Pin Your Content
If your goal is to grow your Instagram account, once content has been published, pin it to your relevant boards for proper attribution. To do this, choose the particular image on Instagram to grab the post’s URL pin it to your Pinterest board. While this sounds incredibly obvious and simplistic, your first step to driving traffic and growing platforms is unifying them.
3. Quality over Quantity
One of the biggest keys to success on Pinterest is quality over quantity. It should be reserved only for your best, most interesting content. Imagery, infographics, and visuals with text overlays tend to perform best on Pinterest, so if you’re posting a multi-image post to Instagram, consider creating a specific Pinterest-optimized graphic to help it grab more attention. Once pinned, link it back to your original Instagram post for more context as you are now creating great custom content that works across both platforms.
4. Play The Long Game
Since Instagram posts have a short lifespan, by claiming your Instagram account on Pinterest and then pinning posts, you can drive increased traffic and engagement over a longer period of time. From here, more and more people will be able to see it and therefore click-through to your Instagram account, which will only result in an increased following and greater engagement on your profiles.
5. Utilize SEO
Pinterest can have effective SEO purchase when utilized accurately. This is because at a fundamental level, Pinterest is basically a visual search engine. By adding relevant keywords on Pinterest that are specific to your business, while also being aligned with your target audience searching terms you can look to create optimized content with relevant keywords featured throughout just as you would for a blog or website. This helps to increase the likelihood of potential interested users from finding your profile easily.
6. Emphasise The Title
Within this, the title is where you need to focus your SEO attention. While there are many different places you can include SEO keywords on Pinterest, the most important one is your Pin title. Your keywords should cover as many bases as possible, feature as many terms as possible, all to help your Pins to start appearing in the right audience’s search results. Alongside the title, include keywords in your Pin descriptions, alongside any and all relevant search hashtags.
7. Hashtags Too
Speaking of which, while there’s no defined rule regarding exact numbers of figures, the best performing Pins tend to include around 5-10 keywords with 3-5 hashtags. By capturing multiple keywords in a Pin description, you can provide a clear, informative description for viewers that looks to generate interest and conversions. Doing this can help dramatically increase the traffic to your Pinterest profile, boards, and Instagram page through resulting click-throughs helping you to build an engaged audience that is more likely to be interested in purchasing from you.
8. IGTV
Another strategy to grow your Instagram using Pinterest is to utilize IGTV videos and incorporate them into your Pinterest. As a primarily visual platform, videos perform extremely well on Pinterest, so much so that last year there were 6 times as many video views on Pinterest as there were the year before. The reason for this boom and success is that Video Pins allow brands and businesses to share a great deal more on the platform without a lot of extra effort. Whatever you want to do from behind the scenes videos to product demos and tutorials or Q&As, the options for videos on Pinterest stretches only as far as your creativity will take it.
9. Stories
You can repurpose Instagram Stories for Pinterest content by simply sharing it as a Pin. Although unfortunately any interactive elements built into your Instagram Stories, say stickers or swipeable CTAs, will no longer be active or usable on the new platform. So these are present it’s wise to remove them but if not share it to Pinterest and look to build your audience across a multitude of platforms.
Final Thoughts
Having an Instagram marketing guide is important, having one that can be connected with your Pinterest account will help to generate increased interest, traffic, and conversions. Both Instagram and Pinterest are two of the most visual social media platforms out there, and when used together, can help you display the personality of your brand and build deeper connections with a much greater number of engaged followers.
To grow your Instagram with Pinterest, you need to engage with your audience and offer them a significant, tangible reason to pay attention to you and the most effective way of doing this is with helpful, visually-led content. You can also check our, How to Choose The Best Marketing Channels For Your Small Business? and TikTok vs Instagram articles for further reading.
