How to Promote on Pinterest Without Being Annoying

Mind your manners, even on Pinterest.

Pinterest is a great place to find and share content and it’s perfectly acceptable to share your own. However,  some people take this to an extreme and it can be annoying to followers.

Most pinners are very courteous and follow the Pinterest etiquette guideline of not using Pinterest for pure self-promotion, but every now and then some forget their manners. Lately, I’ve noticed pinners pinning the same image multiple times to different boards.

As a strategy for marketing your content, this is a great idea. Not every follower will follow each one of your boards, so it can be good to pin your content to each of the different boards that it applies to. When it becomes a bad idea is when the same image is pinned to multiple boards without a break in time between each pin.

A deeper look

Not sure what I mean by this? Here is a hypothetical example:

1. I just published this awesome blog post and I want to share it on Pinterest  (Please excuse my self-promotion  😉  )

2. I pin it to the multiple boards that it will apply to, one pin right after another.

3. After I go on my pinning spree, this is what my followers would see on their computer monitor.

This single image was pinned to the 3 separate boards that it is applicable to in my Pinterest account.

• The Power of Social Media board- The podcast is about a social media network
• The Pinterest board- The podcast is about Pinterest
• The Podcasting board- It’s a new podcast that I want to share

The problem is, that it was pinned repeatedly back to back with no time between each pin. As you can see in the image above, this clogs the feed of your followers and it’s even worse on mobile devices.

Here’s a look at the Pinterest app on an iPad in this situation:

It’s even worse when looking at it on an iPhone, the 3 pins take up the whole screen!

As a Pinterest user, when I come across this it’s very annoying, don’t you agree? As a blogger and business owner, I understand the reasoning behind it, not every one of my followers subscribes to each one of these boards and I want to share it with as many people as I can to help my blog and business grow.
A better approach is to pin multiple times throughout the day. This is better for a few reasons:

• Some followers do follow all of your boards and possibly hundreds or even thousands of others, they might have missed your group of pins their feed earlier in the day. Pinterest only allows a certain number of pins to show in your feed. I’m not sure exactly how many this is, but on the day of writing this post, I was only able to scroll back in my feed to what was pinned in the previous 5 hours. (Accounts that follow fewer or less active pinners can see back longer periods of time.)

• Your followers are in different timezones. We’ve seen the infographics and read the articles of the “best” times to pin but Pinterest is growing globally. I have international followers and keeping their schedule in mind could be beneficial for blog and business growth.

• It will keep you from being annoying and clogging your followers’ feeds!

It’s not all about you 

Spacing your pins throughout the day is time consuming, it is easier to just pin them all at once. But, if you really want to be successful in growing your blog or business, it isn’t about what’s easiest for you. It’s about what’s best for your customers. It’s about minding your manners and being a true lady or gentleman. (There are paid services that can schedule and post to Pinterest for you.)

This reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies: Blast From the Past.

Troy: “…good manners are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them…the short and simple definition of a lady or a gentleman is, someone who always tries to make sure the people around him or her are as comfortable as possible.”

Have you noticed any annoying pinning habits on Pinterest? Share it in the comments.

If you know somebody guilty of this, go ahead and share this blog post with them, maybe they’ll get the hint.

***Bonus Tip***

By changing my pinning habits to pinning a few pins several times a day instead of pinning a lot of pins once a day, the number of followers I have is growing at a much faster rate.