You’re here because you’ve heard that group boards can help you grow on Pinterest.
And you haven’t heard wrong!
In today’s post, I’m going to be sharing with you my top tips on how to find and join the right group boards on Pinterest.
If you’ve been using Pinterest for a while, you’ve probably already heard about group boards. So in this post, I’m going to explain to you a couple of different things.
#1 I’m going to explain to you what group boards are.
#2 We’re going to be talking about why you actually need group boards. What is special about them? Why should you care?
#3 We’re going to go through how to actually find the group boards that are right for you and what to look for in each group board
#4 And the last thing, we’re going to cover how to join the group boards the right way
So let’s dive in.
#1 What are group boards?
Group boards are boards that are open to more than one collaborator.
If you’ve been using Pinterest for a while, you’ve already probably come across personal boards and group boards, but you didn’t necessarily know the difference.
So personal boards are boards that only allow one contributor at a time and you probably made some of them, right? Depending on the pins you save, or maybe even the categories of your blog, you probably created personal boards.
Group boards, on the other hand, are boards that allow more than one contributor. So if you open one of your boards up to other contributors, that will automatically become a group board.
So the main way to differentiate between personal boards and group boards is that in personal boards you are the sole contributor and you’re the only one who’s actually allowed to save pins to that board. Whereas, in group boards, you have more than one contributor so multiple people can have access to the content within the group board and share and save pins from that particular group board.
Moving on… Let’s jump into…
#2 Why do you need a group board? Why are they important?
If you’ve been using Pinterest to grow your audience online then you need to leverage the audience that you don’t already have and group boards are an excellent way for you to do that.
When you first start out on Pinterest or even for the first couple of months, you probably don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers and you don’t have that much organic reach at the beginning, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
You might also be limited with your content and you might not have a large variety of pins that you can save and share related to your particular topic or niche. This is where group boards can help you.
Not only can you find content that is very relevant to your niche and to your followers and save and cross promote that content, but you can also get your own pins cross promoted using group boards.
Think about this, you’re a brand-new blogger who just started a food blog, joined Pinterest and you’re looking to expand your reach.
You can create personal boards, but those personal boards are only going to be with a bunch of people that are actually following you, which might be a handful of people.
In order to actually increase your audience and to get your content and pins out in front of more people, group boards are an excellent tool for you to leverage other people’s audiences. And in this way, when you join group boards, which have a large number of followers, let’s say 5,000 or 10,000 followers, you also have access to that audience as soon as you become a part of that group board.
So that’s why you need to be thinking about group boards in your long-term Pinterest traffic strategy.
Moving to the next point…
#3 How do you actually find group boards?
There are two main methods by which you can find group boards.
Method #1: Using Pin Groupie
Pin Groupie is an external tool that gives you data about how many contributors are there, how many followers each board has, which niche each board is in.
You can go on Pin Groupie, type the keyword search that you’re looking for. So let’s say you’re a food blogger and you’re looking for boards related to food blogging. So you would just type in food blogging or food pins or food recipes and you would get a couple of search results, which you can then go one by one to see which group boards are open to contributors, which fit your needs and get more information on how to actually apply and join them.
Method #2 : Using the Pinterest native search tool
Go to the search bar and type food bloggers board and hit search. Then, instead of searching by all pins, search by all boards and then go one by one and see which boards have more than one contributor. The boards that have more than one contributor are likely to be group boards.
Now, not all of these group boards might be open to request, so you have to go one by one and check out the description of each group board to figure out which ones are actually accepting the new members and which ones aren’t.
Moving on to the most juicy part of this post…
#4 How do you actually join group boards?
Currently, I get requests every week because I have over a million monthly viewers and an established presence in Pinterest, but when you’re just starting out, that might not be the case. So in this case, you can go about two different ways of joining group boards.
Option #1 : Request to join feature
Pinterest recently opened up this feature in the last couple of months. This allows you to go to a group board and click on the “Request to join” in the description page itself. And that’s a pretty straightforward way of doing it.
You don’t need to do a lot of things, but many group board owners haven’t really activated that feature or don’t really use it because they want to filter out their contributors in a much more strict way. If that feature is not available then follow the next step.
Option #2: Follow the instruction(s) step-by-step
Some owners will ask you to fill up a Google form, some will ask you to send a DM or a message. Some will even ask you to subscribe to their YouTube channel. It all depends on the contributor and the owners of this group.
The easy way for you to find who the owner is is to just click on the icon, which shows all the people that would join the group, and the first person is usually the owner of the group.
When you open the group board page on Pinterest, you’ll be able to see a description which would tell you what the owner requires you to do. It could be that they just want you to follow and then send them a message on Pinterest. It could be that they want you to fill a Google form, depending on how highly valued the group is on Pinterest, it might be a little bit harder for you in the beginning to get accepted.
Group board owners are pretty picky about who they let in. So you want to make sure that you follow all the steps and assure them that you would be following the rules.
There are also a couple of best practices that I want to share with you when it comes to actually joining and finding group boards.
When you join group boards, you will find predominantly two types of group boards. There will be ”all niche boards” which will be open to all types of content creators. And then there will be ”specific niche boards”.
So, for example, if you’re a food blogger, you will find a board which is food bloggers only or if you’re a travel blogger you will find a board which is only for travel bloggers so it doesn’t allow any other blogger from any other industry.
Now there are advantages and disadvantages joining each of these, but what you do need to keep in mind is that having a good mix of both “all niche” and “specific niche” boards is a good strategy in the beginning when you’re just looking to leverage your audience.
So make sure that you mix up your group boards and join group boards which are hyper relevant and targeted to your particular niche, but you also join a couple of group boards where you can just maximize and leverage other people’s audience through an all niche kind of group board.
The next thing that I want you to keep in mind when you’re joining group boards is to avoid joining spammy group boards.
There are tons of group boards which have millions of followers or 500,000 people that follow the group boards, but they have a lot of spammy content. In general, the value of the contributors is not that high.
And even if you did join, it’s likely that your account will get flagged for spam and not really provide you with a lot of value in the long run.
So, when you’re vetting group boards, do make sure that you actually see the content which is inside the group board and you don’t join group boards which don’t have high quality content.
And lastly, be careful not to join boards that are absolutely irrelevant for your niche.
So, if you’re a food blogger, join boards that are related to the food blogging niche. Don’t join boards that are in travel. If you’re a food blogger and you’re joining boards in travel, that makes absolutely no sense.
Make sure that whatever you’re doing on Pinterest, especially when it comes to group boards is actually really, really relevant to your account, to your domain and to the topics and categories that you save your pins about.
See you next time!
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